Although branded as a ”Maxtor ATA133”, this is actually a rebranded Promise Ultra133 TX2. I've had this card for years and I'm pretty sure that I'm the original owner and remember it being very reliable and my go-to card when I needed some expansion years ago. So it was at least known to be working earlier in its lifetime.

When testing this I noticed that the system would struggle to boot at the BIOS screen with the system hanging or sometimes failing to boot entirely with just a POST code and a blank screen. I wasn't sure if it was the controller or an incompatibility, possibly from an older BIOS on the controller so I tried it on motherboard.

I was able to get better results there and flashed the BIOS to the latest version. I also booted into Windows and ran some tests with an without drivers installed. But I was still getting instability with random blue screens and the connected drive disappearing from Windows with write failure in the benchmarking tools.

At this point I was certain that this was note than just drivers due to all of the intermittent problems and decided to recap the board.

I tested the capacitors I removed and they all appeared to be bad but this was difficult to very as I twist these off of the board white destroys the leads in the process and stresses the capacitor housing. If they weren't dead before they are now.

All capacitors on this board are 10uF 16V.

I normally use cheap capacitors for repair work as they are often good enough. But when it comes to data and hard drives I will use premium Nichicon or Rubycon parts ordered from a trusted source like Digi-Key.

I don't stock any surface mount capacitors since I rarely counter them. Through-hole capacitors are perfectly fine with their leads bent over if done carefully but that are harder to solder since they won't lay flat on the PCB. They are also susceptible to tilting over completely as they are hovering slightly above the board instead of sitting flat.

I've considered intentionally laying the capacitors on their side for this kind of replacement but have never actually done so.

Here is a close up of the pads for an SMD capacitor. Notice how there are no holes for a through-hole component. I find these difficult yo desolder without twisting off the barrel first because the pad extends underneath the capacitor and it's very easy to lift a pad accidentally by applying heat from an iron and trying to lever them off by tilting them back and forth.