The thing you use to plug your phone, tablet, drives and other things with is very often the failure point unless you break screens or get water in them.
Normally you simply have a HDD drive with a SATA interface in there, so if the USB connector fails, you can still easily recover your data.
With these things, you’re lucky if they even offer the possibility of repairing or recovering the drive.
In my experience the drive fails more often than the adapter, but they do fail. Also, there is a good chance to recover data from a failed drive. With a soldered adaptor it’s basically impossible.
The worst part is that the externals are often used for backups.
Why would the USB electronics be particularly likely to fail relative to other electronics on the drive?
Because you flex and replug the interface often.
The thing you use to plug your phone, tablet, drives and other things with is very often the failure point unless you break screens or get water in them.
Normally you simply have a HDD drive with a SATA interface in there, so if the USB connector fails, you can still easily recover your data.
With these things, you’re lucky if they even offer the possibility of repairing or recovering the drive.
In my experience the drive fails more often than the adapter, but they do fail. Also, there is a good chance to recover data from a failed drive. With a soldered adaptor it’s basically impossible. The worst part is that the externals are often used for backups.
Because that’s usually the cheapest part that manufacturers can get away with cheapening iut further.
Solder joints
Not particularly, but it happens.