Whats the biggest hard drive for my laptop?

I have an old and trusted sony vaio VGN-T2XP. It came with 60gb Toshiba MK6006GAH hard drive and 512 memory. I just bought a Kingston 512 to bring the RAM up to the 1G max. I'm happy i ordered the correct memory, however, the hard drive is still a bit small for me.

I contacted Vaio Support and they said "Sony does not offer the opportunity to upgrade any hardware part of the VAIOs, except for the RAM memory. If you want to upgrade the internal hardware of your VAIO by yourself, you can of course do so, but we cannot offer you any assistance." Gee thanks Sony!

So does anyone know what the largest 1.8" hard drive I can fit to this. A laptop shop told me it depended on what my BIOS can support. I googled my BIOSwhich is Phoenix R0052G7 and can't find anything on it.

So if anyone who knows more than me about this (which is most people!) can help I would be really grateful.....

 

I think the limitation is caused by the MOBO.Is the connection SATA or IDE?

 

Looks like a IDE (aka ATA-6) hard drive. I just had a look on newegg, the largest one is a 5400rpm 250GB WD hard drive. There are more choices at the 160GB capacity.

 

IDE (which makes it ATA I believe).

That makes sense....how would i find out which MOBO i have? Whip off the cover easiest or can I look it up somewhere?

 

thanks johnny....i was posting rambo and you came in with the answer before me!!

johnny, i'm getting the impression that although they make the drives that big, my computer may not be able to support it. I can't seem to find out what the limiting factor is. One shop told me on the phone that I "should be allright up to about 100g". But once i open the box...no refund. So they expect me to buy on a "should be allright" basis? you see where i'm comin from? I looking for the information that limits the size of hard drive my motherboard/bios can support...and sony won't tell me

 

I thought that the limit for the IDE interface was 160GB.

 

Did you notice he wants 1.8"?

 

I think the largest 1.8" drive is an 80gb or 100gb from toshiba. Even the fastest 1.8" drives are slow, so upgrading the harddrive may not be such a wise idea.
You may be better off getting a ide to compact flash adaptor and running 2 8Gb 266x compact flash cards. They will give you 16gb of capacity for about $150 and speeds of up to 40mb/sec. Most 1.8"drives average 16mb/sec or less, so the speed will not be their with a new harddrive.

K-TRON

 

Span.com shows the MK6006GAH as 8mm thick and having the 50-pin connector. The challenge is to find a higher capacity HDD with this connector. The MK8007GAH is a possibility, if you can find it.

Most of the newer 1.8" HDDs (with up to 160GB about to arrive) are now using a ZIF connector. Perhaps someone makes a very compact 50-pin to ZIF adaptor which would fit in the T series.

John

 

Toshiba just announced a 160 1.8 drive...
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=259874

 

But how can the OP connect his notebook to a SATA HDD?

John

 

Aren't there adapters ?
If not, oh well...

 

ok JR...you've really given me something to work with. I didn't know there were different connectors

So I need a drive with an ATA 50 pin connector. That 80g you mentioned does seem to fit the bill allright.

i guess it must be an ata6 drive. the later toshiba drives are ata 7. is this sata? with a totally different connector and sompletly incompatible??

so i gues i need a 50 pin ata6 hard drive. my understanding now from googling is that this has a 137gb limit??

 

well i know that you can bye a hard drive witch is 1eg that is 100,000gb for a laptop for about between £1000-4000

 

Umm, what?

 

The 137gb is the LBA limit (logical block addressing). You need to update to the latest service pack to get 48bit LBA