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    Has anyone dared to upgrade their hard drive on the SZ?

    Discussion in 'VAIO / Sony' started by ke0, Mar 7, 2006.

  1. ke0

    ke0 Notebook Enthusiast

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    I ordered a SZ140 from Sonystyle and it should be here any day now. I also ordered a Hitachi 100gb 2.5" hard drive and Mushkin 2gb ram kit. I know the ram won't be very complicated to install, but I'm worried about installing the hard drive. Has anyone here upgraded theirs? If you did could you walk me through the process? Thanks
     
  2. vaioguy

    vaioguy Newbie

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    keo,

    I upgraded mine to an 80GB 7,200 RPM SATA Travelstar 7K100. It screams. It is also very noisy, and I am not sure how the Drive protection driver is likely to work. The process required two small screwdrivers, and some courage - once you get to the drive, you have to unstick various pieces of felt and plastic that protect parts from eachother. I also had a little difficulty in lifting the keyboard, which you can solve with a credit card to push the retaining clips in.

    Other than that, it was not a problem. I am looking forward to bumping it up to a 2.26Ghz Duo when those are available at a fair price.
     
  3. ke0

    ke0 Notebook Enthusiast

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    Hey thanks for the response. Did you take any pictures of the install?

    I just got my SZ and am thinking of doing it too. I actually bought one with a 100gb hd so I wouldn't have to change out the hd, but I already have a 2.5" 7200rpm seagate that I could put in there. Do you think it's worth the trouble?
     
  4. dcp

    dcp Notebook Consultant

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  5. LandShark

    LandShark Notebook Enthusiast

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    do you happen to have some sort of diagram to show how to disassembly the SZ?? I also planned to upgrade the cpu down the road too (currently have T2400)!

    also, when upgrading to a different hard drive, could I do a one to one exact image copy so I don't have to mess with reinstalling everything??
     
  6. ke0

    ke0 Notebook Enthusiast

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    wow awesome... thanks for the link. removing all those screws frightens me... especially taking off the keyboard.
     
  7. vaioguy

    vaioguy Newbie

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    Have courage... seriously, use a credit card as a lever, and you will be able to lift the keyboard with a minimum of force.

    I used Acronis True Image to image my 100GB drive, and then restore onto my 80 GB 7,200 drive. Worked like a charm - although it will not support an external USB drive. I had to save and restore across the network.