Upgrading the hard drive on a Vaio S4XP

Hi,

Apologies for what is a pretty basic question, but I am a moron when it comes to these things!

I have a Sony Vaio S4XP, with the 100GB hard drive it came with. It is on its' last legs, and needs to be replaced. As I'm all out of space, and have to keep my music on an external HD, I was wondering whether it was possible to upgrade the capacity, say to 500GB (I see Western Digital have recently released a 2.5" SATA 500GB laptop hard drive)?

My IT department at work assure me that 100GB is the maximum that I can go, but I don't see how that's possible, if the drives are still the same physical size??

Any responses would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

 

I think S4XP is the UK model number. Think it is PCG 6G1M elsewhere...

 

Your drive is probably a PATA drive. not SATA.

If you go into the device manager or BIOS you could post the modelname here.

The largest drive that will fit is a WD 250GB Scorpio. The fastest drive that will fit is a 160GB Samsung HM160HC.

Your laptop may have problems with drives over 137GB though. here's some info:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=174140 As far as I understand it, if your laptop suffers from this limitation, you'd have to partition the drive on another laptop and then you can use it's full capacity.

 

Hi, thanks for responding.

The hard drive is a Toshiba MK1032GSX. The interface is ATA7/Serial ATA 1.0a/Serial ATA II 1.2.

Would that mean I am able to upgrade to higher capacity drives than 250GB?

Thanks,

Jules

 

Yes that's a SATA drive and any SATA drive will work.

I'm just not sure if it is possible that your laptop can not do LBA, as your IT department claims.

I'll move this thread to the hardware forum so we can have some others comment.

 

Thanks a lot for your help. To be honest, I don't really trust the guys in my IT department anyway!

 

You should be able to support any SATA HDD (2.5"; 9.5mm).

I don't think LBA will bother you. The ICH6M controller is fine, but can't say about the BIOS.

Even if you hit LBA, you can partition your drive into two or more 130GB partitions.

Now it depends upon what sort of HDD you need. Performance/Battery life ? (Budget ?; US ?)

 

I really need capacity more than anything else. 220GB of music which I'd like on the laptop itself, amongst other things.

I'm assuming 5,400rpm is pretty standard for speed. Battery isn't a huge concern, as I'm usually plugged in anyway. What other factors are there to take into consideration?

Happy to spend roughly $150-$200. Unfortunately I'm based in India, so the latest HDs don't seem to be readily available. However I should in theory be able to get one sent over...

 

You could go for WD3200BEVT or Hitachi 5K320 if you want 320GB. They're fast and quiet.

If you really want 500GB you could go for Samsung HM500LI. I saw a benchmark yesterday and it seems that the acces times have improved (18ms).

The 320GB will perform a bit faster than the 500GB, but not a big difference.