Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
Has anyone looked into upgrading the hard disks on the VIAO AW290?
I asked SONY if the AW290 could accept the new WD 1tb 12.5mm laptop drives. They never answered that question. SONY on-line technical support insisted that no upgrade were possible. The SONY Phone support line said the AW290 could be upgraded to two 750GB drives, but the BIOS would not handle the 1TB drives. They did not answer my original question on if the drive bay would accept 12.5mm drives.
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Yes, listen to stupid tech support staff less, talk to people at NBR more.
Yes, you can upgrade your HDD. Your AW can hold 2 or even 3 HDDs, depending.
Yes, it'll hold the new WD drives. Depending on the 290 configuration you originally purchased, you can put 2 of them in your machine. If your AW came with only one HDD, you may need to buy some additional (expensive) parts from Sony in order for the computer to support 2 or 3 HDDs. But it can be done. the original 500GB HDD's that came with AW's were 12.5mm drives.
In fact, the AW is one of the few laptops that CAN accept 12.5mm. But keep in mind, those WD's will only be sold via external USB Passport setups, so you'll have to pull it out of one of those to put it in your laptop. And they'll be...$250, I think. You'll want to format them fully. You'll also want to make a backup image of your current HDD, unless you just want to reinstall everything from scratch. -
ThatÂ’s great, thanks for the information.
I purchased the 290 with the two drives for 1tb RAID 0. I agree with you on SONY support. I get different answers each time I try to use them. Sometime it seems they just don't want to bother checking.
I talked to WD and they said the bare drives will be out in 6 weeks, but some distributors may have them sooner. Looking forward to the extra room since I'm about out of space.
AW290 Hard Disk upgrade
Discussion in 'VAIO / Sony' started by rpasqual, Jul 29, 2009.
