Would this hard drive upgrade be possible on my Vaio, 4200rpm to 7200rpm ? RAID

At the moment i have a slight clicking noise which can be annoying at times and its possible it maybe a hard drive issue, if it turns out to be that way that their is a problem with one of my hard drives and it has to be changed would it be possible to upgrade from 4200rpm hard drives to 7200rpm. I know i would obviously have to change both but the way i view it is that if i have to change my hard drive then why not upgrade them as 4200rpm ive found is quite slow and it lets down what is a VERY GOOD AR series laptop.

Would this laptop allow that change ? The hard drive info and RAID info is below. Why Sony put 4200rpm hard drives on a new model £2,000 laptop which came out just 12 months ago is beyond me.

The details are below:

Model: VGN-AR51SU

Hard Drive 2 X 250 GB - Serial ATA-150 - 4200 rpm

Storage Controller Serial ATA

The hard drives are: 2 x FUJITSU MHX2250BT

Its running Raid 0

 

Yes you can. Seagate, WD and Hitachi make good 320GB 7200rpm drives.

You could also go for two WD 500GB 5400rpm drives. They're not much slower than the 320GB/7200rpm drives due to the higher data density.

 

Phil, thanks for your quick reply. Would this be a straight forward change over of drives with nothing else to do, does anything have to be done on the RAID side or is it basically a swap over and away you go ?

 

I don't know because I have no experience with RAID.

I'll move your thread to the hardware upgrade forum, you may get more help there.

 

you cant just install the new harddrives and go from their.
In the Bios, you should have options for a raid manager.
Usually you have to press one of the F1-12 keys or TAB to enter into the raid manager.
You will have to put both new harddrives in, and than in the raid manager, you will have to create an array for the drives. You are probably limited to raid 0 or raid 1.
You have to create an array, and than you can install the operating system.

You need two identical harddrives to perform raid 0 in a laptop

K-TRON

 

What would you say are the best hard drives on the market to go for as a possible replacement for the ones i have now, manufacturer and model etc.

Thanks for the replies so far, its appreciated.

 

Seagate 7200.3 has the highest transfer rates and comes with 5 year warranty.

But Hitachi 7K320 or WD3200BEKT are also good.

 

One question i forgot to ask is how would this afffect my sony warranty as i have a fresh 12 month warranty with them, also i will be taking the ram from 2GB to 4 GB and i will be using after market memory like everyone does.

So would Sony turn round and say your warranty is now no good if i replaced both hard drives and replaced the memory ?

I just don`t understand why sony only put 4200rpm hard drives in such an expensive laptop and only 2GB of memory, i would expect a lot of people make a similar change.

 

You'd better check the warranty documentation. It ought to be OK but I think Sony are a bit petty about such things: My bro swapped his original drive and memory back in when he had to send his Vaio in.

 

The 4200rpm drives are there because they are quiet and much cooler than any other harddrives out there, so that's why!


The warranty should work just fine aslong as you have the original hdds and memory available and put it in before returning it for anyhthing concerning the warranty.