Armed Pineapple

I recently had the need to disassemble my Maxtor Basics external 640GB hard drive. I was looking for a way to find out what was on a spare hard drive and not having an external SATA dock handy, I decided to strip this external drive down. A quick Google search found this Australian site with a great guide on how to disassemble the drive although it lacks detail and pictures.

I’ve taken pictures of various points in the diassembly process and hopefully I can give a few tips along the way to those looking to disassemble the drive. You can click on the pictures to view the full size versions.

1. Find the sticker at the back of the device. If you run your finger along it, you should find a small screw. By either lifting the sticker with a knife or by punching a hole through the sticker, remove the screw with a philips screwdriver.

2. You’ll notice that one of the long sides of the enclosure is glossy and bears the Maxtor label. With this side facing you, start at either end and slowly lift the glossy panel off with a flat head screwdriver. There are 5 tabs at the top and 5 at the bottom that need to be fully detached. I found that it’s easier to work from one end to the other rather than trying to detach all the top tabs and then all of the bottom ones. You’ll probably need to be quite rough with it to disengage them all.

3. With the exposed side of the device facing you, start from the right and slowly disengage the tabs holding the top of the enclosure to the bottom using the flat head screwdriver. It’s easiest to work from the back of the device, all along the far side and finally disconnecting the front.

4. Take note of the LED light which will be connected by a small twisted cable. This will pop off easily if you grip it with your fingers and give it a gentle tug. You can lift the metal enclosure from its plastic cover when this has been done.

5. There are 3 shallow screws holding the metal case together (circled in green in the above photos). Remove these and the case will slide apart.

6. On the underside of the remaining case, there are 4 screws (circled red) which are holding the hard drive onto the case. Unscrew these with a Philips screwdriver and the hard drive will slide away.

7. Reassembling the case is easy. Just follow these steps in reverse making sure that the tabs are correctly aligned and that the metal enclosure is slid all the way to the rear of the device.

If you don’t want to use a flat head screwdriver and risk scratching the enclosure, I often find that a thick guitar pick is usually an excellent tool for prising things apart.

As you can see, the drive is simply a SATA to USB dock. I experimented with a 2TB SATA2 drive, however that made the entire device refuse to even be detected by both Windows and Linux. A 250GB SATA drive worked fine however. I can’t deduce from this what this enclosure will accept, but I’d be fairly confident putting any SATA drive up to 640GB in here.