What kind capacitor do I need for Maxtor HDD?

[todesto]

hi, all

I ran into some strange situation for me with a Maxtor HDD.
My m/b won't recognize the HDD, so I took it out and examine the board and the capacitor has fallen off.

I want to know if I can get this working by replacing a new capacitor, then I need to know what spec and where I can get this. Does anyone know?

This is Maxtor Maxline Pro 500GB 7H500F0 and I don't care about the data in the drive as it has been backed up already. I just want to try it to see if i can get this to work again as I could use extra HDD storage.

 

[jaydice]

You would need a BOM Bill of Materials for the PCB Printed Circuit Board to determine what the level of capacitance is.

I can tell you that the cap is pretty generic and it is an SMT component, and that it is a ceramic cap. These generally come on a reel with anywhere from 5,000 to 50,000 parts. Getting ahold of just one probably isn'g going to be too easy. Where it is .01uF or .1uF or 1uF is impossible to say without testing one of the adjacent components, assuming that they are like in value as they are like in physical dimension.

For example the cap at location c500 looks to be the same size as the one that ripped off on c501.

If you are able to determine the capacitance and then also acquire a part, you would have to have access to a solderer to remove the remaining fragments from the land on the PCB, the metal conducting plate on the PCB, and then apply the new capacitor. It is very possible that an inexperienced solderer would cause a catastrophic defect, called lifting the pad, in which case the pad comes loose from the PCB. This is much more likely to happen with an SMT type pad like this.

My best guess is that is a 4.7 uF cap and you can get 10 of them here.

http://cpc.farnell.com/1/1/4000-capacitor-0603-4-7pf-50v-npo-10pk-c0603c479c5gac.html

Best of luck

 

[Crashman]

My best guess is that is a 4.7 uF cap and you can get 10 of them here.

http://cpc.farnell.com/1/1/4000-capacitor-0603-4-7pf-50v-npo-10pk-c0603c479c5gac.html

Best of luck

You realize the caps you linked are 4.7 pf, not 4.7 µf. That's a fairly big difference

 

[jaydice]

Good point about the different level of farad. Microfarad and picofarad. I have no idea which the cap is. OP have you tried to simply bridge the connection? That could work, for a while as well. I wouldn't load anything critical on this HD but video files as backup wouldn't be bad. The data is still protected on the actual media and absolute worse case scenario if you had something on the drive you needed to get off, you could swap the PCB out with another HD's PCB or just replace it by acquiring a new HD of the same model and utilizing it.

 

[Crashman]

Good point about the different level of farad. Microfarad and picofarad. I have no idea which the cap is. OP have you tried to simply bridge the connection? That could work, for a while as well. I wouldn't load anything critical on this HD but video files as backup wouldn't be bad. The data is still protected on the actual media and absolute worse case scenario if you had something on the drive you needed to get off, you could swap the PCB out with another HD's PCB or just replace it by acquiring a new HD of the same model and utilizing it.

You do know that capacitors don't actually allow DC current to flow through and bridging it creates a short...

 

[elel]

Bridge the connection? That sounds like a bad idea ... what if it was a power filter cap for an ic? The capacitance is definitely in picofarads on a ceramic of that size.