Instructions for installing ssd drive into the sony vaio tz

ok I just received the sandisk 32gb ssd drive 1.8" zif drive first thing you have to make sure is that its a zif connector, I first ordered the wrong samsung ssd drive with a mini ata adapter instead. Any ways here it is:

(I took the first 2 pictures from duffy from Leog.net).

1) 1. Remove the battery.

2. Remove the left hinge cap (the one that the adapter plugs into). Take at a look at the pic below. Wedge your thumb in-between the hinge cap and the hinge. Pull the cap outwards (to the left...in the direction of my thumb) and slide it off.



3. Next take these screws off (their all the screws needed to take off). After the screws are off you can take the top off but in the center make sure you disconnect the one ribbon cable before totally removing the top off.


4. This is what it looks like when you have to top off where the ssd drive is located. The cage is easy to take off there are 2 screws to take off the bottom left silver screw that you see and see the bottom right where there is a hole, I've already taken the screw off there I believe its a different color black screw.


5. Make sure you take off the silver screw I mentioned in step 4 on the left side and one more silver screw disconnecting where the a/b/g/n wireless card and usb adapter goes and disconnect the ribbon cable to it and remove that piece its very easy. You have to remove this to take off the silver plate where you fit the ssd drive into. Also this piece needs to be removed so you can have enough room when you place the ssd drive with the silver plate onto that area and need the extra room on the left side to scoot your ssd drive so you can have enough room on the right side for the short reached zif connector to fit into your ssd drive while encased in the silver plate.


6. Then you take the silver plate off and fit it in and the ssd drive slides easily onto the silver plate.


7. this is what it looks like after you place it on the correct spot with the connector connected.

8. Heres a close up what the zif looks like its very easy just slide in and originally the zif had the yellow tape over it just take the tape off and just slide the zif into the ssd drive then just put the yellow tape over it to safely enforce it on there.

9. Here is the drive fully installed and after I placed the drive in there and screwed it in notice I installed the left piece back on and its done!!

 

I don't know how Flickr works with their image hosting, but, for the moment, the images are corrected and showing below.

 

What are your thoughts on the performance increase?

 

thanks nanaki =), Since I've been usinga 7200rpm the ssd drive seems a bit faster at loading windows vista. But what I notice the most is loading small apps its like instantaneous!! Also it seems like bottlenecking is gone as well in loading programs. Another huge, huge, difference is the heat it feels very very cool now =) One question is that anyone know how to turn off the 2.5" harddrive while using the ssd drive?

 

yep, normal windows power management, turn off all harddrives asap.

 

when i go into control panel/power options then where do I do it?

 

I do it like this (XP): right click desktop, properties, screensaver, energysettings, energy schemes.

(it might be lost in translation because this is a dutch XP)

 

anyone know how to do it in english vista??

 

If you can build in a SSD in a Sony TZ, you can propably find this out by yourself

 

jjahshik32, you are very lucky to have Sandisk SSD !!!

Im sure your TZ (HW configured) version is so far, the fastest. !!

btw, off-topic to this thread..
after I installed Vista, Office, and Adobe Pro, etc. My 32GB SSD only has 11GB free !!... I am now thinking of removing Vista junks like 'speech' etc...
and to be honest,, SSD is not so fast.... I can clearly feel the 'loadings'
maybe because SSD 1.8 is really should be compared with 1.8inch 4200rpm HDD (which I never used...) or.. maybe because I was used to my office Desktop Core2 Duo machine that has SATA2 3.5 inch HDD ??

 

maybe because of hidden recovery partition?

 

Nope. That 7.2GB abouts is gone too, I used one of the free partition manager and later merged and both C and D became one. I did that in the DVD-boot clean-vista installation.

Basically, Vista business itself took like 10GB alone,

BTW: I managed to use vLite to make 680MB ISO ! , but obviously Im a bit too scared to use this to install, since, some functions and dependencies could cause problems, etc. (Well thats what I read from various users in the vlite forum)

 

All I know is that the sandisk is faster than the samsung ssd that comes stock with these machines. While the samsung has a read of 51Mbit/sec the sandisk has 67Mbit/sec and a hitachi travelstar 7200rpm has 61Mbit/sec. Also the seek time on the samsung ssd has .2milliseconds while the sandisk has .12milliseconds. And the watt usage for the samsung while active is 1.0 watt while the sandisk uses the .4 watt, man this ssd drive is very very fast =) just glad that one guy didnt want it from his new dell. He took it out of the dell and put it in another laptop but then he sold the other laptop and bought a new laptop uses a 2.5" ssd drive so he sold this one and at the time he was the only one selling it.. maybe now there's more? but can only find the samsung ssd drive on ebay with micro ata adapter only though.. only japanese sites I found sells the zif ssd so far..

 

I just kept the vista on the ssd drive which was 29.4 gb and after vista home basic I had 20.2 gb left and after all the little programs that I need and some movies I have 14 gb left =) still plenty and the 2.5" harddrive to have 184 gb left but how do you in vista turn off the damned 2.5" harddrive?????

 

Don't forget to clear out the restore points here and there. They're 300MB a pop and windows likes to create one with each application installation... You can easily lose 2-3 gigs to it.

 

I found a website that seems to be selling the Sandisk ZIF 32GB SSD:
http://www.dvnation.com/nand-flash-ssd.html#Sandisk

 

im going to buy the TZ with the 100gB hdd and ODD tmr. Can i ask if i want to add a SSD drive, can i buy one, open up the notebook and put it in? Are the zip connectors there?

 

That's not correct. You should have about 18GB left over after installing Vista, Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat.

And the SSD feels faster than a 10,000rpm Raptor HD, so again your observations are being warped by something else.

 

The second they make a 128 gig version for under $300 I'm going to do this to my SZ.

 

I agree the SSD feels very very fast. Especially with starting programs and opening documents, with HDD there is always al lag. With SSD it feels more instantinous.

 

To jjahshik32, what were your impressions of doing this install? Average difficulty? How long did it take you?

I'm considering doing this as soon as I can get my hands on one of the new Sammy 64GB ssd's (btw anyone know when those are going to hit retail?)

 

Based on the 32GB benchmarks, you'd better eye for a Sandisk one.

 

So I've heard, but apparently the 64gb sammies are much faster than the 32s, and the 64gb sandisks don't start mass production till Q3 which means probably no retail till next year. Yes, I'm impatient.

 

yes, I do agree that my TZ SSD (1.8" samsung) do perform fast. I just checked using HD tune, it has 0.1ms seek time, and average around 30MB/s

But perhaps beacuse I am not used to Vista yet, I've turned off indexing, restore points, etc, now I gained 4GB+, so I have 15GB free.

But still, I clearly remembered back in 2003 when I installed XP into my Pentium M 1.5Ghz laptop, it was extremely FAST.

ps: I am now running Vista business on my TZ with everything turned-off. That is, no fancy craps, no gadget slide-bar !! (yes it clearly improved) I now have much better response time.
ps2: also, I went to intel website to download the latest 945GM driver.

 

did you have a 1.8" 100GB initially? Just wondering if the regular hard drive uses a ZIF connector rather than an ATA...

Thanks!

 

Dell sell's theses drives. They sell them as a user replacement for the D420 laptops Just call dell sales and ask for the drive they are cheap to much cheaper than the other places. I got one for my Asus U1F before I got the TZ90 it was like 400CDN and took a couple days to get to me.

 

is the one from Dell ZIF or ATA?

 

I would say below average, it was very easy. 1-10 I would rate it a 3. First time without knowing anything except that 1st and 2nd step pics I posted with knowing where the screws were.. took me 10 minutes to take apart but taking the top casing gently took about 5 minutes then the ribbon comes right off (very easy just in the center) and that's it everything is naked to see =D from there just few screws for the ssd and its done.. I found that replacing the hd 2.5" actually took twice or even 3 times longer because you have to take more screws off i think about 4 or 5 more then take it out of the metal casing and the plastic part on the right side comes off and you have to unscrew that part as well and put it back together just feels very tedious. Next week i'll be taking it apart again.. but done it 3 times already and i'll be replacing the pci-e wifi card to a dell broadcomm because my osx needs broadcomm =D

 

Here are some more pictures from a Japanese website.

The first link is how to initially open up your TZ. The second and third show further disassembly details for an ODD model and non-ODD model respectively:

http://kunkoku.livedoor.biz/archives/51004188.html
http://kunkoku.livedoor.biz/archives/51005030.html
http://kunkoku.livedoor.biz/archives/51014826.html

 

Last time I ordered they are zif. The d420 has a zif drive preinstalled

 

zif is the one u need

 

You installed it succesfully? You just followed the guides? Are you comfortable with opening up a notebook, because I sure ain't.

 

Awesome! This was the main reason I got the TZ, couldn't wait for an apple subnote and the TZ's design is choice. Please I implore you to make a thread on that when you get the chance.

 

jjahshik32 , So OSX does not accept Interl WiFi N module ?

 

I got osx86 uphuck 1.4i r3 latest version to run just fine =) the wifi n module doesnt work with osx86 but if you order a dell draft n 1500 a/b/g/n card and its made by broadcomm it works natively, I just ordered on from ebay brand new and it should come next week =D man osx looks gorgeous on this screen!! even better than the mbp led 15" santa rosa!! I just sold the mbp lol!! =D

 

oh yea i'm very comfortable in opening my tz hehe =D sorry got a little giddy there I've opened it up probably 4 or 5 times now and i'ma pro at it!! even the first time was easy =) very easy!! the mbp was harder to take apart in my opinion because the 15" versions the top part is freakin on there where it snaps on where the tz doesnt really snap on tight like that only where the battery area on the left and right side around the round ring parts snap a bit on but just be a little gentle and wiggle and wiggle it and it should free itself very easy again=D one thing you should keep in mind is that when you put it back together its kind of hard to get that two circular parts on the right and left where the battery goes in to go in right.. just hold up the laptop with one hand and look at it from the side view and match the sides first then it should easily go in the battery part and i did it on my bed when i did that just incase i might've dropped it with one hand lol and very low to the bed =D

 

oh and after putting it back together still looks and feel and is brand new without any problems!! If you think that if you take it apart and it wont be as tightly fitted your wrong still as tightly fitted now than before I even opened it up =D

 

I would say that that goes towards showing just how well designed and built the notebook is.

 

What exactly did you do to get osx running properly? I finally finished downloading that version of uphuck, but i've installed about 3 times now, first time had a looping welcome video, now i've got a looping setup screen.

Particularly, what packages/drivers/ktexts did you install when you did it?

 

Hehe, Nanaki tracked down your post about OS X for me. I'm looking forward to trying this as well. Can you put Tiger on the D: drive? I only have 7GB left over after just Vista and Apps (obviously something is not right)!

I would love to be able do this!

 

Would you guys drop Vista just to work with OS X on your TZ?

 

Very very quickly if I could get it running.

 

Are you sure your downloading uphuck 1.4i<~~~ not a and R3 not R1 or R2? It worked right out of the box after I installed it. Only thing that doesnt work is brightness controll but i'm fine with that, I'd rather just have my screen on full all the time still get 5 hours of battery life from it, just very happy that its an led screen that consumes very little power and has no inverter and not an ccfl lamp with an inverter. Also sleep doesnt work but I just leave my lappy on all the time and when you close the screen it does turn off the monitor. Other than those two everything works fine. As for ethernet I kext edited that portion for the ethernet to work, all you do is just change a 3 lines to a specific number and i'm using the ethernet while i'm still waiting for that dell wireless n. I was suppose to receive it today but since its labor day mail delivery is closed =( I hate holidays.. but good news is that I bought an iphone and did a perfect hardware unlock and now my tmobile works with the iphone or any other sim card!! I might buy more and unlock them and sell on ebay if anyones interested.. hehe btw on my iphone right now!!

 

Hey forgot to ask.. but what are you exactly having troubles with it?? Like it wont start.. or?? It works 100% fine with me.. I installed osx on the sandisk 32gb ssd drive and it only takes up 7gb the whole osx which is nice leaves me with 22gb freespace =D And osx loads in 14 seconds flat!!! its amazing so I dont mind the sleep function not working I just turn off the machine when i'm done for the day and just reboot in the morning which is very fast hehe

 

I am indeed using 1.4i R3 for sure ... I can install no problem, but I'm not sure what packages/patches to install other than the core, I've tried many combinations, and always here is the result: install works, but then on boot when the first screen comes up asking you what country you're in for the configuration of mac os, it just keeps resetting, as in, i don't have a chance to click on anything it just goes to a black screen, shows something like "loginwindow started" and a a file path of that program, and then goes back to the country select screen. It keeps looping like that very quickly. I really would like to get OSX on it, so any ideas I'd much like to know!

 

hmmm.. that's very strange... before you installed uphuck in the install cd via disk utilities, did you make sure that u formated the partition your putting osx as mbr if i'm correct the very last in partition/options. Also.. if you have more questions there is a chat in mirc irc.osx86.hu just come in that room and ask around there are plenty of programmers that can help u that's where i got helped.. but since we both have the same model tz.. i dont know why it shouldnt work.. could it be that your version is a bit different..? I d/led mine from demonoid if that means anything.. maybe because of my ssd drive? either way just go to that irc chatroom and just ask around plenty of knowledgable people there.. far more than what I would know.

 

Thanks...yeah I'll check that room out. Mine is indeed a tz90 with ssd, and I didn't get the release directly from demonoid, although I'm sure it's from there because of the famous "dl'd from demonid txt file". And yeah I've been MBR the whole time. I'll figure something out. Hope your wifi card gets to you soon, and that works well. I wonder when the intel card in there will have drivers...

 

For the package I install the main install uphuck and for the packages I didn't install any only the some meter at the bottom and that's it. You don't need any of the packages.

 

Interesting, well today I tried with just the base system like you suggest, and the temp meter application (before the bare minimum i was doing was the baseinstall +the intel 950 graphics package). Instead of the looping problem like before, I am now waiting at a blue screen. Also, before for some reason the screen was 4:3 but it was on the left side of the monitor. Now the blue screen is centered in the middle, and still 4:3. How long did it take you to start up the first time? Mine is at about 9 minutes now, there's activity on the disk, don't know what it's doing if anything.

As an update I now know that not installing the 950 graphic did nothing but loose the video signal to the LCD, because I hooked it up to my external monitor just to check, and it was doing the exact same looping thing. I have no idea why your install works fine yet mine does not, with the same hardware, it's really confusing me.

update#2, after many more restarts, and reformats, I finally got Mac OS X installed!!! What I did which was probably the obvious thing but overlooked was did the install with just the base package, then I started up, and instead of booting normally to my looping problem, I went into safe mode by typing -x, that made it boot normally, I then rebooted the machine into regular mode and it worked for some strange reason. Now I'm installing all the packages I need for drivers like video and ethernet separate.

Sorry for jacking this thread and turning it into "instructions for installing os x into the sony tz"...

 

dont forget too for the screen to into the 1366x768 u need to install screenxres was the only way to get it to work at native res. Only sleep and screen brightness doesnt work but the ssd drive boots it up so fast that it doesnt matter.