topic Re: Upgrading Hard Drive on FZ11Z in PCs & Accessories

Upgrading Hard Drive on FZ11Z

7hil — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 18:23:21 GMT

Hi

I love this little laptop but the hard drive is too small now. How easy would it be to upgrade the hard drive?

I'm fairly technically minded and have cahnged the hard drive on my PS3 a few times. Is it much the same on this laptop? I've noticed there are a few flaps underneath that are screwed down. Presumably one of these is for easy access to the hard drive?

regards

Phil

Re: Upgrading Hard Drive on FZ11Z

leferdi24 — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 19:35:15 GMT

Hi

I love this little laptop but the hard drive is too small now. How easy would it be to upgrade the hard drive?

I'm fairly technically minded and have cahnged the hard drive on my PS3 a few times. Is it much the same on this laptop? I've noticed there are a few flaps underneath that are screwed down. Presumably one of these is for easy access to the hard drive?

regards

Phil

Hi Phil.. I have 3 vaio's and all off them i have changed the stock HD with ease.. I have done so because having a machine with a 2.53ghz processor 256mb dedicated gpu with a 4200rpm hard-drive does not make any sense to me. your machine will only be as fast as the weakest link in the chain. it this case a 4200rpm drive..

So to waffle on there just taking this opportunity to dig at Sony for such slow drives.!

Re: Upgrading Hard Drive on FZ11Z

7hil — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 20:01:50 GMT

Is it normally a 2.5 inch drive on Vaios? Also do you just run the recovery discs on the new drive to reinstall?

Are there any instructions anywhere on how to change the HDD on an FZ model?

Re: Upgrading Hard Drive on FZ11Z

7hil — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 12:24:48 GMT

I've worked out how to change the hard drive. It's in the flap on the left hand side of the underneath of the laptop. After mooving a few screws the drive just slides right out.

Final question from me then is, once your new drive is in do you just put the recovery discs in and they start up or do the recovery discs need to be booted from Bios? If so how do you do this?

Cheers

Re: Upgrading Hard Drive on FZ11Z

Blencogo — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 13:15:18 GMT

You need any 2.5 inch SATA had drive - not thicker than 9.5mm. Check this because some of the newer large capacity drives are thicker - 12.5mm.

You can reinstall the system by just putting the system recovery disc in the drive and restarting.

It may be worth making a fresh set of recovery dvds in case the ones you made are corrupted. Also keep the old hard disc - just in case.

The alternative is to buy something like Acronis True Image and make a mirror of your present hard drive onto an external hard drive, you can then restore everything as it is without having to reinstall all programs, settings and updates. You boot from a disc made with Acronis and then recover the whole disc from the external hard drive.

Re: Upgrading Hard Drive on FZ11Z

7hil — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 18:30:45 GMT

That's really helpful Blencogo, thanks!

I'm installing a 500GB 2.5inch drive. Hopefully the laptop will recognise it ok.

Cheers!

Re: Upgrading Hard Drive on FZ11Z

Blencogo — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 19:45:16 GMT

Check the thickness of all 500GB drives carefully - Hitachi 500GB drives and others that need 3 platters are too thick to fit your Vaio.

Re: Upgrading Hard Drive on FZ11Z

7hil — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 21:35:18 GMT

I'm using the Western Digital (WD) Scorpio Blue WD5000BEVT 500GB 2.5" Internal SATA Hard Drive which is also PS3 compatable so the thickness of this presumably should be fine.

Phil

Re: Upgrading Hard Drive on FZ11Z

leferdi24 — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 21:42:38 GMT

I'm using the Momentous Seagate 7200rpm drives... In my book they cannot be beaten.. Running 3 vaio's (C2, Fe41z & Fw21m) all with the seagate drive.. I have tried other h/drives but they have proven to be unreliable for me...! Do your research be you buy...!

Re: Upgrading Hard Drive on FZ11Z

Blencogo — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 21:49:35 GMT

Size looks OK

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=506

Re: Upgrading Hard Drive on FZ11Z

7hil — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 22:27:22 GMT

I was worried about going from a speed of 4800 to 7200 and the effect that might have on the laptop which is why I chose a 5400 one. As for Seagate I do prefer them but do they do a 500gb 2.5inch sata now?

Re: Upgrading Hard Drive on FZ11Z

sonypass33 — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 09:38:21 GMT

Hi 7hil

I have a VGN-FZ21S and recently upgraded to the same WD5000BEVT drive you mentioned. It is a 9.5mm two platter drive so you should be fine there.

I wanted my laptop to be exactly as it was with just much more capacity so I went down the cloning route.
I had a 200GB in it and about 160GB used so the cloning process took about 4-5 hours but once it was done the swap over of drives was pretty easy.

As suggested above I’d recommend the Acronis True Image 10 software.
If you live in the UK or Ireland you can actually get this software free in the current (I know, I know the current issue is March09 and it’s just gone Feb) issue of Personal Computer World Magazine.

It’s as simple as:
Load the software
Connect the new hard drive via an external enclosure and 2.0 USB cable
Choose clone option

It will start a bit rate copy and a while into the process it will re-boot (which at the time scared the crap out of me lol) and continue copying. It re-boots so it can copy files currently being used by windows.

After the 4-5 hour wait I powered off and REMOVED THE BATTERY.
There’s a small holding case on the old hard drive you need to remove and attach to the new one. Then pop in boot up and the only thing you’ll notice is you’ve doubled (2.5 times in my case) the capacity. The speed was the same at 5400 so I didn't notice much difference on that front.

Hope this helps

Re: Upgrading Hard Drive on FZ11Z

7hil — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 11:53:47 GMT

That's brilliant p2p2. Thanks for the detailed instructions. I'll let you know how I get on. Should be getting the drive tomorrow.

Cheeers Phil

Re: Upgrading Hard Drive on FZ11Z

7hil — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 17:11:40 GMT

Upgrade took 10 minutes and was easy.

One surprise was that the 500GB drive was actually smaller in height than the drive that was in the machine by 3 mm!

Anyway upgrading an FZ is easy peasy and thanks to all for the help. Now when are those 1TB 2.5 drives coming out?

Re: Upgrading Hard Drive on FZ11Z

sonypass33 — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 09:14:09 GMT

I love it when a plan comes together