[PLUG] boot failure

Richard Owlett rowlett at cloud85.net
Thu Nov 12 13:38:02 UTC 2015


On 11/11/2015 4:17 PM, Keith Lofstrom wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 09:41:58AM -0800, Denis Heidtmann wrote:
>> This a SATA hard drive dock which mounts in an ATX case.  It is a Kingwin
>> KF-1000 BK.  When I get a blank panel to fill the hole I will take it out
>> and look it over.  I am surprised that there is anything to go wrong inside
>> except connectors.
>
> I use a lot of those, but they are cheaply made.  Connectors
> have limited lifetimes, because the copper diffuses into the
> thin gold plating on it.  Then the copper oxidizes, making
> insulating spots, and making the surface much less compliant,
> with less contact area.
>
> You can clean the contact a couple of times with a pencil
> eraser, but if the gold is thin (on the Kingwin docks, it
> may be just a few atoms thick), and it will get worn away.

Abrasion bad ;)
Back in the 60's I was an electronics tech in a university's 
chemistry department - think nasty environment for electronics. 
My boss had a solution (pun intended) to the problem - during 
routine maintenance we applied a mixture of De-oxid(TM) and watch 
oil to connectors and switch contacts (particular open style 
rotary switches). His rational for adding the watch oil to the 
De-oxid (advertised as a lubricant as well as cleaner) was that 
the watch oil helped form a mechanical barrier to the atmosphere 
at the actual point of electrical connection.  I found 
http://de-oxid.com/. They appear to have tweaked the formula, 
added a hyphen to the product name, and changed the label color 
in last half century.

HTH


>
> It would be nice to find a more expensive drive dock with
> thicker gold plating.  It would also be nice if test labs
> would measure this stuff and publish results in something
> like what Consumer Reports used to be, before they devolved
> into knob counting and political opinions.
>
> Keith
>




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