How to replace the SSD in Vaio VPCZ11 and VPCZ12 with non-Sony SSD

Enny02 i need help to take apart an Intel X18-m. Thanks

 

just pry apart the metal in the corners to get it to separate from the black plastic pieces. Use a really flat screwdriver. That's how I did mine.

 

Thanks beups i try later.

 

Hello,

I have version of the VAIO Z with HDD. I replaced the HDD with a SSD C300 2.5 ".
I would like to add a second SSD C300.
Is there a adateur Msata to connect 2 SSD. (Msata to double Msata) ?

Thank you

 

There's a link on the first post in this thread. It would have to be a 1.8 drive fitted where the stock sony ssd usually goes (which i would assume would be empty since you got the hdd model.

 

Afaik you don't have the connectors to add SSDs to a HDD-Model.

 

No, my hdd is plugged in place of the CD player with a connector msat.
I just replaced the HDD 2.5 "SSD with a 2.5"
Yes, actually the site is empty but the connector is made by the SDD C300)

 

So can you put two 1.8" 256GB SSD's in and a 2.5" 256GB SSD and make a 768GB RAID0 array?

 

Yes you can, you can even pop in two 256 1,8's and another 512 gig 2,5" in the (optical) drive bay and make a 1TB raid0 powerhouse.

 

First of all I'd like to thank u for this great thread and the excellent documentation of ur work so that the rest of us can follow on ur steps

Well it's very true that the RealSSD is faster that the Toshibas but are u 100% positive that you do notice the difference in day to day tasks? Maybe it's just phycological knowing the the C300 numbers are faster.

Anyhow, there are a couple more things I'd like to ask..


1. Do u have any updates on the lack of TRIM with raid and the intel controller? Is it coming any time soon?

2. There are quite a few offers online for the Z with 256GB... so even if I'd get the 128gb version and add an 128GB realSSD the setup would be more expensive. Do u still think it's worth the price difference and the effort?

3. What u guys have done with all the replaced toshiba ssd from the Z? Ebay?
I mean even if I put it in a USB caddy it will be severely limited by the bandwidth right?

 

1. Waiting for the SAME
2. Personally, if I opted for the 256GB Version, I would have completely forgot about the Upgrades, the Caddy, the Extra Price, the extra effort. but having the 128GB makes you ((dunno the word)) but tight on storage space, and your HEART will break when you install something like GTA IV which is 15GB on the SSD, plus w/o any games, and just using the basic appz,OS, Office, Codecs, AV, etc. you will be left out with approx 70 GB (USABLE). which is .....

but, Add 70 GB to 128GB and walla! you have 200GB that you can play with.

3. Need to know too

Will

 

greetings everyone. I finally got my VPCZ13A7.
It's the 320Gb HDD model without optical drive.
Maybe I DID NOT understand what to do, that's why I dare ask the question...
M version come with the 320Gb HDD installed in a caddy where the optical drive is, is that right?
Means if my goal is to have a 120Gb Corsair Force F120 PLUS the 320bg HDD, it's not possible since the SDD won't fit anywhere else but in the original HDD fitment, am I right?

 

That is correct. On those models I'm not sure if connection is available where Sony's stock SSD's go, if it is, you just need the dual sata cable and you'd be able to install up to two (2) 1.8" ssd's sans their casing.

I crammed in dual C300's in place of Sony's stock 128gb ssd.

 

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where the dual msata ribben cable connect to, the white rectangle, if you have that, then you should be able to add the following cable:

https://www.servicesplus.sel.sony.com/sony-part-number-A1781464A.aspx#

Although seeing as you purchased a HDD version of the Z, i'm going to assume you don't live in the states, so the link won't actually be to useful in purchasing it.

 

Thanks for the reply guys.
Indeed I do not live in the US, I'm in Reunion island, lost in the middle of the Indian ocean (a french territory that is).
I guess I'll simply open up the Z and check if the connector on the mobo are there. if it is, I'll probably order a 1.8" 128go C300 (unless corsair make a F120 SSD )

Thanks a lot though, I see a lot lot more clearly the path now

 

Just google earthed your location and WOW, you really are in the middle of nowhere! lol

if you're unable to aquire the msata cable, i have mine from my Z11 which is different and only works with Z11 RAID SSD's. I have a 128gb (64gb + 64gb raid 0) stock SSD from my Z, PM me if interested

 

ha ha, thanks Qwaarjet. At least, it's good that even in the middle of nowhere, we got DSL and Z to play with.
One thing is sure though, as I saw a picture of a Z13 HDD model, the white rectangle connector is the same on both model.
No clue though, if I assume that all mobo are the same, I should assume too that if I find the msata cable, it should be possible to create a C300 raid 0 array, but I kinda don't think that it could be that easy.
I more about adding performance to my Z alongside the 320gb HDD storage space, so one SDD would be enough.

 

Yes, it's that easy! Finding the cable will be the hardest part for you I would imagine. Once I got my cable in, I odered 2 1.8" C300's, stripped them bare, it's a tight fit in there so they have to touch each other, I just applied black eletrical tape inbetween both drives so there wouldn't be any eletrical short anywhere. Booted it up, the intel raid software found both drives, but I decided against putting them in RAID-0. A C300 is fast enough on it's own, I decided for stability sake to leave them 2 seperate drives.

I removed the 2.5" C300 I had in my optical disk drive and reinstalled my optical drive.

The sweetest thing about these Z's i believe is the ability to have up to 3 aftermarket drives installed, be it 3 SSD's or 2 SSD's and a HDD. It provides a crazy amount of flexibility.

 

Only thing I don't understand is that..
I'm sure now (as I've read it) the HDD version got a cable with two connector, standard SATA.
On the SSD version, all the SDD AND optical drive are connected through that single white connector? which would means that the cable got two msata leading to the SSD area and one sata leading to the optical area, that's it?

 

No, the SSD version's cable has 2 msata soley for the SSD's. The optical drive has it's own seperate connection to the motherboard.

 

Sorry if this has already been asked, I couldn't seem to find it.

I have a Z11 which originally came with a hard drive. I was looking at the possibility of getting 1 1.8" c300 128 gb or 2 64gb in raid to put in the empty part of the laptop (where the original ssd would have been). I would therefore have 1 or 2 ssd running as one windows drive, and the 500gb HDD as a second windows drive.

I understand you guys found the proper cable for this for the Z11 (first post), but I was wondering if I was going to run into problem trying to connect the ssd and the hdd at the same time (perhaps the hdd on the hdd model is using the ssd sata port instead of the dvd drive sata port, if that makes any difference....)

Thanks

 

I don't have a Z11 but of what I read it has enough SATA ports that you can run the HDD and the two SSD's. It is like having the Z1x with dual SSD and optical drive. Also if you check the Intel storage contralloer tool in Windows you'll see several empty SATA ports.

 

Actually, isn't the HDD connected to where the SSD is connected in the SSD models? That's what I saw in my friend's Z115 and made me puzzled as to how I would fit an SSD inside. Any clues?

 

I deliberately bought the HDD version to put an intel drive in its place.

Since my vaio Z came with all the crapware installed, it booted slowly despite de intell SSD.

Finally, I have made the cleaning. There are still many processes running after boot (around 60), but now it boots quite fast.

My vaio Z booting in 21s

There are not any special tricks, every single thing works properly from active noise cancelation earphones to the TPM module and WWAN card.

I haven't tested it thoroughly but, from the first impression, autonomy with the battery looks to be improved too.

The general feeling is improved noticeably!

 

Hi,

where in Europe do i get the SSD cable for the Z11?

I only found shops in the USA.

Thanks a lot.

Mentholi

 

Hm, does really nobody knows where to get this cable in Europe?

 

Hello all,

I've been following this thread closely and today I replaced one of the tosiba ssd's from my vaio Z with a crucial c300 - 256gig.
I'm very happy that everything was smoothing and quick thanks to all the thorough instructions but I'm kind dissapointed on my crystal mark results.

So I've tested the new drive and I'm only getting

4.5-4.7MB/secs for the 4K random writes and about 30MB/sec for the 4kQD32 writes:




I mean I checked Enny02's results for the same drive (the one on the right - 1st one is 2xtoshiba 64gb) and he's getting 28MB/sec and 122MB/sec for the same tests.




Any suggestions ? This must be a bottleneck of some sort right ?
The rest of the tests match pretty closely

 

Is write-caching enabled?

-Peter

 

my 4k's on my c: c300 are 20.5/29.50
on my second c300 data drive, a hair faster.

try running it in safe mode, if it's much higher than you have a driver/software/os issue. Also, is your drive aligned? did you clone or restore? if you cloned, it could possibly not be aligned right.

When i first installed my C300, my write's were in the 4's. I tried to clone at first, but I had some error the 1st time, but completed the 2nd time around, althoug i had poor speeds. I decided just to do a clean install instead, using the Vaio restore disks and my speeds improved a whole bunch but not quite where i wanted them, after disabling sleep mode and leaving my computer on for a few hours, speeds got much better up to my 20.5/29.50 crystalmarks.

236.9/134
223.8/137.1
20.5/29.50
185.8/130.4


of course, the C300 on my X58 based desktop get's 34/89.39 4k's, so much of our scores are limited by the chipset in our laptops :\

 

I was hoping it wasn't but that was the first thing I checked ... and it was enabled.

Well I did clone the drive to be honest.. I didn't do a clean install.
I mean I'd hate having to format and start from scratch cause I did that just a week ago and it was a PAIN!

I will start in safe mode and will post back my results. In the mean time, just a question...
IF the partition is misaligned due to the cloning is there any way to fix it without a clean install ?

 

Ok, so I tested in safe mode... same results
I left it on the whole night and I will leave it on this morning to see if TRIM will improve anything.

 

Ok so I aligned the partition to 128 sectors (64k) and it's all good now! My writes are back to normal and now my speed is 5X faster than the non-aligned partitions.

before alignment:



after alignment:



and I even reached 30MB/sec random writes at some point... gotta love the C300!

and just for reference here's the speed test for the default toshibas (2x64gb)

 

sweet, good job dude. after some random amount of time, your numbers should go a little bit higher, now that it's aligned and gc & trim clean up the mess

you know what's next right? get another 1.8" 256gb C300!

 

Hmm, you should start running the benchmark with lower amounts of data, like 100MB *3 or 50MB *3.

2000MB worth of testing *5 is a whopping 10GB worth of data written and read to be tested... and you ran it like 10 times, so thats 100GB right there..

 

of course that's next in a few months hehe!

Meraki1990, I don't agree.. 50 and 100Mb is simply not enough working surface to have accurate results.
Also with TRIM it's not a big issue. Plus after bringing the performance where it should be i'm only gonna run the test once every couple of months.

 

Guys I'm having some totally random 10-15 sec freezes after replacing the toshiba with the C300. I don't get them very often.. about 1-2 times per day but when i do it's sooo annoying.

After some searching it seems that iaStor is the problem and I'm getting the following error and EventID:

Code:

Event ID	9
Source	iaStor
Type	Error
Description	The device \Device\Ide\iaStor0 did not respond within the timeout period.

I was using intel rapid storage v. 9.6.0.1014 and I upgraded to v. 10.1.0.1008 but still the same issue.

After some googling I found this blog suggesting to disable Linked power mode (LPM) but since this is a laptop I'd hate to lose any power-saving features unless I really had to do it a last resort.



Maybe the c300 doesn't support LPM like the the toshiba?

Or maybe the factory default that sony had installed had a value of 0?
I wouldn't know since I've done a clean install...

Can someone that has replaced the toshiba ssd too tell me what's their option in the registry? Is it (1) or (0)?
Is anyone else having similar issues?

 

what firmware are you on? I've heard of a similar issue with those on firmware 006 which is why i stayed on 002.

 

I still have the 002 firmware. Perhaps it's time to upgrade??

 

errr, well...... ummmm...... read this thread first

RealSSD C300 Series Firmware Version 006 Release - Crucial Community

I have 3 C300 drives that i haven't updated because i'm kinda scared :| let me know how it goes!

 

Unfortunately I wasn't able to upgrade the firmware with the intel controller and the crucial utility. It couldn't find any c300 drives...
I guess I will need to remove the drive and do the upgrade in a different system but I don't have anything else with a micro sata connector.

Anyhow, can u check ur value of LPM in the registry and let me know please?

Also just out of curiocity, are u running the 2xc300 in raid-0 or as separate drives? Cause if they're on raid i'd be very interested to know what's ur random writes score.

 

Mine is set to 1, and mine is a Sony install, not clean.

here's a cheap cable that should help
Newegg.com - SYBA 40" SATA to Mini SATA cable (Power Cable length 6'') Model CL-CAB40022 - Cables

I have them as seperate drives

 

I would love to upgrade my z11 (hdd version with 40gb intel ssd currently) to a pair of 1.8" C300s and use an mSATA -> SATA adapter to connect an HDD to the currently unused port where the optical drive would normally be.

But living in Germany, I'm wondering how to get the needed A1781464A cable for the SSDs. Sony ServicePlus seem to ship only to the US. There is sparepartswarehouse.com, which do ship internationally, but paying 200$ for the 55$ cable is just insane.

I realize there were already at least two questions about getting the cable from Europe, but unfortunately no definite answer.

 

would love to know that answer too. Owning the hdd-version of the vpc-z13 and need the correct cable to connect both the 320GB HDD + my new 1,8" SSD.

 

It would be about $100 to buy it and have someone from the US ship it via USPS 3-5 day service. If you don't know anyone living in the US, I'd be willing to do it for you guys if you're willing to trust me :\

 

Hi guys. Now I have the ssd ribbon. Please tell me how you did fix a pair of 1.8" C300s inside a notebook?

 

Read the first page of this topic. I'd say tape it or make yourself a mounting cage out of sheet metal.

 

Good idea

 

I removed the casing and layered them with black electrical tape.

 

Is it enough for fixing?

 

There's no room for them to move.