Personal Storage 5000XT

I was searching for the same answer myself, found nothing. So, took the brute force approach. From the rear of the case I pushed a wide flathead screwdriver between the top and the back, gave it a twist, and pop. The black plastic on the sides poped out and it was open. Left a little mark at the back.

Anyways, now that you have heard how I did it, looking at the casing from the rear, you see the black platic on the left sort of forming a [ and from the right side forming a ]. If you carefully use a thin flathead screwdriver, and wedge it under either of the 'tips' of the [ and bend it outwards, you'll probably be able to open it without making much of a scratch.

By the 'tip' of the [ or ], I mean one of the points where you would put your pen if you wanted to draw a [ or a ] (so there are a total of 4 points where you could stick that srewdriver).

Note the lock slot has nothing to do with unlocking the casing, it's meant for a kensington lock, like the one you use on a laptop, to secure the drive to something which is bolted down.

Note2 i've inserted a new drive into the casing. The pin setting that worked for me was master drive. I replaced the maxtor drive with a wd3200 320gig drive, works fine.

Note3 if you replace the drive with a new one, the new drive may produce more heat than the old one, and this may result in a drive failure and/or data loss and/or reduced lifespan of the disk. I now use electronics of the casing without the casing, as a fast way of connecting different backup disks to my machine without opening it.

Note4 many people seem to be complaining about the durability of the maxtor disk, maybe I'm just lucky, but I've used mine on and of for nearly 5 years now. You should however not leave an external disk without proper cooling (like this one) on for prolonged times. It's suited for temporarily moving data and taking backups. If you use it for filesharing etc and leave it on 24/7, it will probably die within a much shorter time than you might expect.