Upgrading Hard Drive on FZ11Z

[7hil]

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

[7hil]

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?

[sonypass33]

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

[7hil]

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

[7hil]

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?

[sonypass33]

I love it when a plan comes together