Replacing my laptop hard disk myself

[el_cardi]

Hi everybody,

I'm the proud owner of an SZ4 machine (full specs below), downgraded to XP. Since my 120Gb hard disk is always at 90+% full I'm thinking of replacing it with a 400Gb or even 500Gb version (also SATA, 5400rpm) myself. Can I do this or will these bigger disks produce more heat causing problems ?

This is one of the disks I'm looking at : Hitachi

Thanks,

el_cardi

[Blencogo]

Hi el_cardi.

Nice to hear from you again. I hope all is well.

The large capacity drives you are looking at will not fit in your SZ. You are restricted to drives with a form factor of 100 X 70 X 9.5 mm and the 500GB drive in your link is 100 X 70 X 12.5 mm.

I think the largest drives with a 9.5mm form factor are 320GB at the moment. This is because a 12.5mm drive can fit three discs onto the main spindle where 9.5mm drives can only fit in two.

Heating will not be a problem as nearly all 5400 RPM drives use the same power (2.1 watts at write) and so they will all generate the same heat.

Have a look at the Hitachi Travelstar 5K320 or the Seagate Momentus 5400.5 ST9320320AS

I expect you can see a manual for the SZ at work but if not, PM me with an e-mail address and I will send the manual as a .PDF (it is too big at 3MB to attach here.

[karjuhas]

I'm just bought a Seagate Momentus 7200 200GB to replace the Toshiba 100GB 5400 by SZ4. Does anyone know whether the recovery disks can be used to install to a fresh hard drive, i.e. whether the SZ4 can boot from the recovery DVD? If not, is the only solution to create an image of the current drive, using an external USB enclosure, on the new hard drive?

Found this, BTW, as instructions to physically replace the drive.

Vaio SZ Hard drive replacement

[el_cardi]

Hi el_cardi.

Nice to hear from you again.  I hope all is well.

The large capacity drives you are looking at will not fit in your SZ. You are restricted to drives with a form factor of 100 X 70 X 9.5 mm and the 500GB drive in your link is 100 X 70 X 12.5 mm.

I think the largest drives with a 9.5mm form factor are 320GB at the moment.  This is because a 12.5mm drive can fit three discs onto the main spindle where 9.5mm drives can only fit in two.

Heating will not be a problem as nearly all 5400 RPM drives use the same power (2.1 watts at write) and so they will all generate the same heat.

Have a look at the Hitachi Travelstar 5K320 or the Seagate Momentus 5400.5 ST9320320AS 

I expect you can see a manual for the SZ at work but if not, PM me with an e-mail address and I will send the manual as a .PDF (it is too big at 3MB to attach here.

 

Wow, this makes so much sense ! I guess I was blinded by all those GBs that I completely forgot about the 3 platters and the increased height.

Thanks for pointing that out to me !

Respect.

Luc

By the way : isn't Karcsi going to suffer from heating since he's installing a 7200 rpm ?

[Blencogo]

By the way : isn't Karcsi going to suffer from heating since he's installing a 7200 rpm ?

The 7200 RPM drives use about 2.3 watts which is a little more than the 5400 RPM drives and will cause more heat and battery usage. I would check your temperatures using something like 'PC Wizard 2008' for the first few weeks as the SZ gets quite warm already.

Yes, you can replace the drive and boot up with the System Recovery disc inserted and this will install the original software onto your new drive. You will have to update and reinstall everything since you bought it. Make a couple of extra copies of the Recovery Discs just in case!

If you want to keep your existing settings, updates, software and data - you will need to make an image of your drive using something like Acronis True Image 11 and save to an external hard drive. You can then boot from an Acronis start-up disc and reinstall your system exactly as it is now.

[el_cardi]

Reading the manual I learn that I have to disassemble my SZ4 in order to reach the hard disk. Damn .... I thought it would be easy like with my wife's HP (4 screws on the bottom and you can replace the disk).

I think I'll stick to an external usb-drive for now 😞

Thanks for the info.

Cheers,

Luc