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

[leferdi24]

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.!

[7hil]

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?

[7hil]

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

[Blencogo]

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.

[7hil]

That's really helpful Blencogo, thanks!

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

Cheers!

[Blencogo]

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

[7hil]

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

[leferdi24]

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...!

[Blencogo]

Size looks OK

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