Question Clean SSD With Isopropyl Alchohol

[tfbraingm]

Suppose you have a laptop that was exposed to steam and there was condensation on surfaces/walls in the room. You find signs of moisture on your ssd, you let it sit (with drying agent(s) such as rice, silica beads or damprid) for 24h but nothing visibly changes. Primary Question: Do you use isopropyl alchohol to clean the ssd, particuarly between the surface mount IC's and the board (concerned about A: drying B: corrosion)?

Also suppose you find some moisture near the cpu/gpu do you clean the pins/socket with Isopropyl Alchohol (Im thunking no on this ladder part)? Do you think that water vapor/steam could have gotten between the CPU/GPU and their respective sockets?

I am also wondering how long one has to sit (with drying agent like described above and a fan) on this before there is too much corrosion. Would an attemot at a back up be worth the risk before attempting to clean with IPA?

Also what if a pcb seems to have a "wet spot" on it? What might this mean?

 

[TerryLaze]

Drying agents don't do anything, any corrosion that is going to happen happens so fast that it doesn't matter if the device dries a couple of hours faster or not, the damage will already have been done.
With water damage you have to act right away, don't let it dry to cause corrosion, open it up immediately, well shut it down immediately and then open it up for cleaning.

If you care about the data on the disk or the laptop itself then it will need a professional cleaning, you can rub down any part that looks funny with isopropyl ,even sockets.
If corrosion got under a chip then you are screwed, it would have to be removed then cleaned then put back and that's expensive.

Putting the affected ssd into a working pc before properly cleaning it could cause a short and frying it.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

If we are talking about an nvme drive, one method you may try is get a small amount of gold cleaner and rub on the contacts.

My reasoning for this is I used to have a pc repair business, and when I was starting out I one put in a call to a tech from Hawaii. Reason being I wanted to ask some questions of someone, I’m from the USA mainland, no way that I could really affect his business. Plus it was night here and day there still.

Anyway during the conversation one thing that came up was he got a lot of systems that would not boot. The reason was they are surrounded by salt water being on islands. So what he would do was remove the ram from the machine, clean the gold contacts with cleaner like you would get at a jewelry counter for your wedding ring for example. Once it died sufficiently put it back together and it would work again.

He never mentioned nvme drives but then again this was years ago before that technology existed. If it did exist it was brand brand new. Let’s just say windows xp was very much alive and well. But might be worth a shot.

 

[tfbraingm]

Thanks for the replies!

Putting the affected ssd into a working pc before properly cleaning it could cause a short and frying it.

Wanted to clarify, fry the pc or fry the ssd?

If we are talking about an nvme drive, one method you may try is get a small amount of gold cleaner and rub on the contacts.

Which contacts do you mean, under the smd or the ones that connect to the mobo?

Just let ut dry over night again, still seems to be a "stain" on the back of the pcb, and the top of the IC's it seems really hard to remove the dampness, i tried rubbing it with IPA but it did not seem to help.

So it seems like i might be okay to get a toothbruch, dip it in IPA and try and get a few bristles under the IC?

 

[tfbraingm]

Spot on the back seems to correspond with place where the ssd is fixed on top of a ribbon cable connection

 

[ohio_buckeye]

Just be very gentle so you don’t damage anything.

 

[TerryLaze]

Thanks for the replies!


Wanted to clarify, fry the pc or fry the ssd?

Mostly the ssd, it would take some freak accident for a drive to hurt the mobo.

Just let ut dry over night again, still seems to be a "stain" on the back of the pcb, and the top of the IC's it seems really hard to remove the dampness, i tried rubbing it with IPA but it did not seem to help.

A picture is worth a 1000 words...or something.
Upload a really high res pic of the area so that people know what "stain" is.
If it doesn't go away with IPA it could be corroded PCB which is bad.
You can use imgurl or any service you are familiar with.