SSD upgrade for ancient sony?

The wife has an ancient VGN-T350 and would like to have it boot faster. I'm wondering what SSD options exist. Near as I can tell it uses a 1.8" drive but I can't tell if it's got a ZIF cable connector or regular PATA pins. Anyone know for sure?

Then it's a matter of whose SSD would work best in it. There's a 60gb drive in there now and that's adequate for the tasks required of the machine.

Upgrading the whole machine would be a lot more expensive as it'd require replacing docks (home & office) along with various accessories.

What're my choices?

 

open it up and see what you got. there are 1.8" ssd drives. i'm sure you could one in the neighborhood of 60 gigs in the neighborhood of $120 or so. ssd drives are made to replace hdd's and i think the only other variation on them are the msata which are mini sata.

 

Um, well, given the amount of work involved in opening it to get to the drive that might be a hassle. I'd rather only have to open it once. It's a Toshiba 60gb in there now. From what I've read it has a 44 pin connector. But I don't know if this is a standard connector or something unique to these particular 1.8" drives.

And since the thread title is "SSD upgrade for ancient sony?" you'd think it was clear I'm talking about getting an SSD for it, not yet another HD.

There are many variations of SSD. 1.8 pata, zif, mini sata, etc. mSATA is a whole other thing (and unsuitable for this application anyway).

So does anyone have actual facts to help answer the questions?

 

well, um, as stated before i don't think are many variations of ssd connections. i think pata is the 44 pin connection. try there. or try inputting your laptop on crucial's website and see what happens there. i think crucial only makes sata drives though.

 

You might want to quit while you're ahead - there aren't any PATA SSDs worth buying. After all, the SSD fad didn't start until long after SATA was a universal standard.

 

Again, facts? I mean, there's something to be said for opinions and speculation. But I'm looking for actual answers here. Fortunately others have been quite a lot more helpful: http://forum.notebookreview.com/7544353-post112.html

 

I went with a Renice PATA SSD, 60gb in size. I used a PATA to ZIF adapter to connect it. The drive and adapter are small enough to fit into the space where the 60gb Toshiba hard drive used to be installed. The adapter plugs into the existing IDE cable and then the ZIF cable folds over and into the drive. I added a strip or two of rubber foam to hold the drive more tightly in place.

I used Acronis True Image Home 2011 to backup and restore the drive. I backed up the current C: and D: partitions on the HD to an external USB drive. This took a while as USB transfers can be slow. I connected the Renice drive via it's supplied USB case. I rebooted using a gparted CD and set up two new partitions on it, taking care that the first one was aligned at sector 2048 (as opposed to 63) in order to avoid alignment problems. I then rebooted back into Windows and used ATIH to restore the drives to the new partitions. I then shutdown and installed the drive.

I rebooted and everything just worked. I didn't have to do anything else. It boots a lot quicker now and launches programs faster too. Haven't done any timing or benchmarks tests with it yet.

The downside here was dealing with MDD. It took over 3 weeks to actually get the drive. This after they lied claiming the drives were 'in stock'. When in truth they'd not even been shipped from the factory and then got held up in customs. I strongly caution people to avoid purchasing from MyDigitalDiscount.

So is it worth it? From a faster boot and usability standpoint I'd have to say yes. But you're still spending a fair chunk of change to get what amounts to the same amount of storage, just with considerably faster access. It's certainly breathed a bit of new life into this machine.