Half Dead Drive?? Bent Pin, Crammed inside Pin, reads slow as...??

I had a minor/major accident while changing out one of my drives. Lesson Re-Learned if an IDE cable does not want to go in, DON'T JUST PUSH HARDER. I bent one pin over and crammed a 2nd pin forcing it into the drive only leaving a little nub sticking out. I was able to straighten the bent pin, and use tweezers to pull the 2nd pin out until I felt it kinda lock into place. It was a spare 80gig storage drive that was full of movies. I was able to get the computer to recognize it and was able to get the data off of it, but it is running painstakingly slow.

To read the 60gig that was on the drive and copy it one of my SATA drives took over 5hrs.

I emptied it, formated it, ran scan disk, and everything is coming back clean. However as a test, I took a 2gig ISO file and tried to copy it to the drive, and it took nearly 10min to copy.

This seems really really slow to me.

Anyone got any suggestions on what has happened. Is the drive junk at this point.

If you pushed the pin inside the casing without it bending it is possible the connector inside is broken.

Some drives you are able to see on the bottom the connectors that go to the PCB. CHeck those to make sure none are damaged.

More than likely the one that got pushed in broke the conenctor inside, there isnt much room for that to get pushed in without breaking..

You may need to unscrew the PCB to get a look at both sides to tell if anything is broken.. Will void your warranty though...

If you don't know how to already, this is likely a superb opportunity to learn about soldering electronics. Some years ago I did the same thing to an IBM 60gxp, pushing one of the pins way back into the connector. What you've done so far is exactly the same thing I did to get it working, short of needing to add some solder onto the point where the pin joins with the PCB. It's a little more difficult these days due to the smaller sizes of the pin-PCB joins, but still very do-able. The only downside is that the pin is fatigued and prone to getting pushed back in whenever the cable is changed, so I just left the same cable attached and move both together when required.

To go from a different point, 10 min for 2gb is a little slow but not THAT slow, remember you are dealing with IDE. If you would rather try something else maybe now trying a raid drive of some sort. They go fast i believe and are neat. hope you get it fixed