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Few days ago I built a new PC and of course I had to do something wrong. In this case I rotated the in-board M.2 plastic lock in the opposite direction and was wondering why it doesn't sit well.

After I figured out that it should go in the other direction I noticed that I most likely damaged/moved that silver part (is it called capacitor?) which is visible in the attached image.

I booted the PC, installed Windows on it and everything works fine (so far). Before I booted the PC I was moving my PC from horizontal to vertical orientation and vice versa, I checked and that moved silver part is still in its place so it's not completely detached from the drive.

Should I worry about it? I know that as of now it may work fine but is there a higher chance that it will suddenly fail partly or completely? Should I perform some software scans on the drive to make sure that everything is fine? Or should I just go to some electronics service to ask them to check it out and maybe solder that part.

Sorry for my lack of HW knowledge, help will be much appreciated. Also, please let me know if it's called capacitor or is it sth entirely different.

Visible moved/damaged capacitor (or whatever it is, I'm not sure):

Here's how the drive looks like on product pages in the online stores:

cooktheprogrammer
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1 Answers1

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The position and tracking going to it looks like a decoupling capacitor. It is there to take high frequency noise from the connected pin, potentially caused by the power supply or the device itself, and to couple it to ground thus resulting in a slightly cleaner power supply.

The chip it connects to will have multiple power lines, all with their own capacitors working to smooth the supply at that pin. A single missing capacitor will not prevent the device from working, but it may not work quite as well as it should.

So long as the other capacitors are fitted you are probably fine. We tend to go a bit overboard with these things to make sure it that under worse case conditions. If the rest of the components in your system such as your power supply and motherboard are high quality and have good clean power supplies then chances are you are fine. Decoupling is usually about cleaning up a marginal supply and providing a local reservoir to deal with tiny surges.

I would expect that one single missing capacitor will not be a problem, but as always your mileage may vary.

Mokubai
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