HOWTO: Swap VPCS Series DVD Drive for a 2nd Hard Drive.

Heres what worked for me....

For this I used:

• Precision screwdriver set
• Dremel multi tool
• Hot glue gun (not mandatory)
• Needle nose pliers
• OBHD Caddy (I got mine from here) SATA 2ND HDD caddy/adapter replace AD-7930H DVD Drive - eBay (item 400144416851 end time Mar-13-11 07:15:26 PDT)
• SATA HDD

What I need to achieve to call this a "success":

• Bay must look "original" when finished (in terms of fitting), and be unmarked.
• Original CD Bezel must not have to be broken in any way.
• Not have to install any additional software to manage the drive.
• Drive must be able to be "spun down" using Windows power mgmt.
• NOT mandatory to be able to boot from this drive.

Ok so lets get started...

Shut down your machine, and take the battery out.

Ground yourself.

Find something soft (a clean dishcloth or such) to put your Vaio on.

Turn it upside down and put it on the cloth

Get your screwdrivers out




Remove these three screws, then slide the HDD cover toward you as shown by the arrow.




Remove these two screws and lift up the laptop, you'll see the rear of the DVD drive (just where the arrow is), and you can gently push it forward to remove it from it's slot.



It should slide out like this.



And when it comes right out you will have a hole like this.






Heres our drive bay we're going to put in




The first thing we need to do is remove the bezel, I first thought it would unclip - but it's glued on, so I levered it off with a small screwdriver.



Drive bay in the laptop without bezel.



With that done it's time to take the bezel off the original drive bay, i forgot to take photos of this, but you basically unclip the bezel from the edge nearest to you, and swing it away (like a hinge) from the front, it will pop off.



The bezel has got several clips and two pins in it that you will need to drill receptacles for in the new bezel.



This was the hard part. I lined up the drives, and marked the holes I would need to make in the new one, got the dremel out, and went to work.



And this was the end result. Attach your bezel, (I also used a tiny dab of glue to ensure no rattling and a little extra adhesion)



Next you're going to swap the two brackets over - just unscrew them from the original DVD drive.



My caddy had holes for the brackets which lined up perfectly. Only downside was that they were plastic so I had to go carefully as to not strip the threads. The brackets screwed down tightly with no rattles, which was nice, otherwise I would have had to use a dab of glue.





All thats left to do is slide the drive in, and screw the laptop back together.

You can see that my drive is misaligned my about 1mm on the bottom edge toward the notch, I think the bracket needs reseating or adjusting, but overall I'm happy so far.

When you startup, windows should boot as normal, and you'll get the "windows is installing device driver popup" from the system tray.

Once your drive is installed, you will be able to adjust your power management settings to set the drive to turn off after x mins of idle, I tested this with a five minute setting, and it does spin down and up correctly.

I haven't had any issues yet with hibernating the machine or waking it. Next stage is to wait for the next gen of SSD's and then swap out the primary drive for something fast.

Good luck if you're doing this, I hope this guide helps someone.

 

Pretty good result in the end. Thanks for sharing.