Sony S15 2012 Disassembly + ODD Caddy Video Tutorial

Oh snap! I noticed that but figured it was part of the ODD drive. Guess I need to take the laptop apart again

Thanks for pointing it out!

 

You need 9,5 mm caddy, 12,5 mm does not fit and you have to cut it.

Maybe OP should add this to the original post because if you do not remove that piece of the DVD drive and place it in the 9,5 mm caddy, the caddy can move inside the laptop. That piece fixes it so it cannot move at all. It's absolutely necessary to do that, if you haven't open your laptop again and do it. A regular 9,5 mm caddy has the same holes for the screws of the piece so you only have to remove it from the ODD and place it in the caddy.

 

Thank you so much for this walkthrough, wizzardxexe!

 

With regards to 9.5mm/12.7mm are you guys talking about the height or the width of the caddy?
edit: Asking since in the comment section of the video he said that he's using a 12.7mm caddy.

 

Height.

You can fit a 12.7mm caddy in the laptop, but if you try to screw the felt cover back in, you'll notice the only way to do this is by force. It will bend, and will be under tension all the time. Didn't want to do that. At least this was the case with my 12.7mm caddy.

 

I recently purchased the S15, very satisfied so far. The first thing I did is replacing the stock HDD with an SSD (which I had already mounted on my old Acer 4820TG: Crucial M4 128GB).
I'm thinking about getting a caddy to replace the optical drive with the stock HDD but I'm a bit worried about losing the warranty. Is there any sticker or anything else which makes the warranty void?

Thanks!

 

Just replaced the ODD with the caddy and HDD. HDD had a previous system on it and probably it was the reason why the laptop didn't start afterwards.

I did manage to start it with the ASSIST button when the new set of problems appeared. Backlit keyboard, built-in speakers and all of the LEDs on the keyboard refused to work. Will check if the blue cables under SSD are connected good enough - otherwise will investigate the problem further.

Has anyone got similar problems?

 

No, there's nothing at all so unless you break something you are still cover by the warranty.

 

WOW, you just got me afraid. Keep us updated if you fix the issue!

Thanks

 

The DAMN CABLES were not pushed far enough lol ^^
Scared the sh**t out of me.

Took them out and back with care - machine started fine. Just watch out for those little basta**s.

Aluminum caddy for MBP suits just fine - don't install your HDD into a plastic one, the weight difference is slight and metal is more reliable material for sure.

 

Ordering LEICKE DUAL 2.HDD/SSD adattatore SATA per hard disk SATA e con tutti i notebook SATA - 9,5mm spessore unità bay | Modello di Seconda Generazione SATA drive bay con LEICKE hiper-speed technology (ottimizzato per SSD) Copatibile con: Acer Aspire 4810T , do you think guys it's okay for the S15?

 

Yes, that one fits ok and it's made of aluminium so you will feel less flex on the keyboard. It's pretty the same I bought from England
2nd SATA HDD SSD Hard Drive Bay Caddy for Laptops (9.5mm) | eBay

 

Thanks for that. By felt cover do you mean the black strip between the ODD and edge of the laptop in the video?

 

Does anyone know if the added HDD works in RAID 0 or not?

Or how can we enable its performance?

 

I would like to know this as well.
Does anyone have any information about this?

 

Mounted the ODD replacement today, all went flawlessly. Having an M4 128GB SSD as main drive, I'm loving to have some extra space for downloads!

 

Do you hear a middle-strong click sound from the HDD inside the caddy when rebooting?

 

I did this on my Vaio S13 ivy bridge, and after many tries it showed up in disk manager only a couple of times and crashed when I tried to use the drive. Same thing in GParted,

I never saw it in the BIOS either,

My ODD still works fine though.

I also tried different models of caddies as well. (I'm in Taiwan so supply is limitless).

I tried with a 240GB Intel 335 and a WD Blue 1TB 9.5mm. (I use the WD as my regular drive)

I tried it in a Compaq and it worked.

Any ideas?

 

I think there is a problem with ODD replacement in theVAIO S late 2012 models (win 8). Most probably it is a bios related problem, characterized by constant high CPU load (in my case at speed mode 1 of 8 logical cores is always busy). Really annoying, still no workaround.

 

Something similar happened to me, however after some reboots it showed up, and its working now. But it makes a constant high CPU load. I have a SVS 1512 late 2012 model, win 8, WD blue 1 TB.

 

Do you know if the high CPU load goes away if you disable the ODD in the bios? I think until there is a workaround, I will just treat the hard drive in the ODD bay as an external drive. Keep it turned off until I need to use it and then do a quick reboot to turn it on and do what I need to do on the drive. After I'm done, turn off the ODD bay in the bios and keep the CPU load down. Kind of like having an external 500GB drive and takes about as long as digging it out of the bag and plugging it in. Not a great solution, but I can't stand the 20-30% CPU load and the battery drain (can't test this on my laptop as I only have the one drive and I moved it to the ODD bay as I wait for the SSD to be delivered).

 

nope.... still high CPU.....
even if u leave the caddy empty (no ODD no HDD) the cpu load is high. Remounting the ODD solves the high load. The BIOS somehow detects the ODD presence... really strange

 

Dang, guess I'll have to pull the drive out and just go with the SSD until the bios is fixed. Thanks for the reply.

 

So basically the ones who got the late 2012 version of the VAIO S are doubly screwed.
First they cant install the BIOS mod to get great performance out of the 640m GPU. But they also get high CPU usage when replacing the odd to a HDD.

It almost feels like SONY went on this forum after the first version of the VAIO S 2012, and read that it is common that people bios mod and swap their ODD for an extra HDD on these laptops. And thought:
"Hmmmm how can we stop this on the windows 8 model..... Lets make sure we lock the BIOS so they cant mod it anymore. After all we don´t want them to get extra performance out of their laptop.... Then they wont buy new ones next year. And we cant really stop them swapping the ODD to an HDD with out changing the hardware. But we can sure as hell make sure that if they do their laptop wont function as it should."

 

I also confirm the issue with the windows 8 (2012) model, that there is high CPU usage no matter what you do with settings while having HDD bay.

BIOS MOD and HDD bay were actually deciding factors I bought Vaio in the first place.

But now I completely pissed at Sony for being total jerks.

 

Yeah, it's definitely frustrating. I really like the laptop aside from the orangegate screens (thin, light, fast, looks nice, good keyboard, etc). This is another bad mark on it. I tried to return the laptop because of the orange screen, but neither B&H or Sony would return it (because Sony doesn't admit it's a problem and says it's "as designed"), so I'm stuck with it. I'm just trying to get a year out of it and sell it for something better next year.

 

removed the HDD caddy, now is silent, fast and responsive.... interestingly something else is going on when the caddy is mounted (next to CPU load) because without caddy the win 8 goes much more smoother... Lets wait for a BIOS fix.

 

How do you define high CPU load?
I have 10 % CPU load in "economy" mode and 20 % in high load or moderate modes. I am talking about modes you can select by clicking in battery icon, stamina or speed switch has no inmediate effect in CPU load. See pic attached, first part of the graphic is with high load mode, second with economy.

 

I get 35% in speed mode and 18-20% on stamina. I have the i5-3210M and not the i7 like you have though.

 

its a tricky image... In speed mode if you multiply the load procent with the logial core number, you will see, that one logical core is fully loaded. If you would switch to individual core view you would see that 1 of the 8 cores is fully loaded (in speed mode) . Stamina and speed mode has a direct effect on load. Moreover, the loaded core will run constantly at 3.1 GHz (in speed mode) and this is a huge problem.

 

check it in individual core view (speed mode), you will be surprised....

 

Probably 5 out of every 50 reboots it actually shows up but I cant even use it without crashing. I got mine in August so its not the windows 8 model, all though I have installed windows 8, no other OS actually works. I have tried with the OC bios, the Sony bios and the new OC bios and no difference.

 

What shows up 5 out of 50 times? (in other words 1 out of 10 times ^^)
If you talking about the cpu load issue it is really strange. Their havent been any reports about this issue on the windows 7 model. Even if you run windows 8 on it.
I have the win 7 model with win 8 and the bios mod running the 143 bios, and ofc odd replacement And ive never had this issue. And i havent seen any one with it either. At least not on the win 7 model.
The win 8 model is a totally different story.

 

Sorry I was replying to somebody else that replied to me.

I was talking about how it was not working. This is my original post.

 

I can't speak to those people who have problems with their drives being recognized at all, but I seem to have resolved the CPU issue on my Windows 8 Series S (SVCS151290X) This required some hardware hacking to the caddy which could easily blow up the laptop if you short the pins. There are 2 'special' pins on the power half of the SATA Slimine connector, one is for Presence Detect(P1) and should be 1K to ground(P5+P6), and one for Manufacturer Diagnostics(P4) which according to the specs I can find should not be used. I opened up my caddy and found a 4.7K resistor for the P1 connection, I tried replacing it with a 1K and eventually no resistor(open) and no change to the interrupt problem. The existing P4 connection was open, but after measuring the old optical drive I saw it had about 600 ohms to ground, I checked the cable on the sony side and found that the P4 pin was on the cable to the motherboard, based on this I guessed they were using this pin for something and soldered in a small 560 Ohm resistor between P4 and P5/P6(Also replaced the 1K resistor from P1 to P5/P6). Booted it all up and the extra CPU time and excessive interrupts are gone and the HD seems to be working fine.

 

Can you upload some images/pictures of the modification?

 

Sorry, I didn't get any pictures before I closed it all up. But the change was only to the little circuit board inside the ODD to HD caddy.

 

Im so sad, but thanx anyway!
I'm so inexperienced in electronics, i dont think that i'll be brave enough to do it for myself..... maybe some other people will upload some pictures....

 

Unfortunately! I'm having the same problem but really don't know about electronics. Thanks anyway, there should be someone who can do this again with this info and show us how to! You changed in the caddy though? That makes it a little less stressfull for me

 

Haven't done the mod yet, but I'm going to give it a try after I do some practice soldering. In the meantime, I took some pictures of my ODD caddy circuit board.

This first picture is of the circuit board after I'd removed it from the caddy. The red box is the portion we're concerned with, it plugs into the slimline connector in your Vaio, the downward facing port on the right side is where you plug your HDD in.


Zoomed in on the pins in question.
Sorry about the image quality, I was just using my point & shoot, and these pins are pretty small.


I'm not planning to remove/replace the 4.7K ohm resistor that is currently on P1 with a 1K ohm as SteveDW0 did. Mainly because I'm lazy and that seems like more work/chance for me to screw something up. I'm only planning on putting a ~600 ohm resistor between P4 and P5+P6 and hoping that will do the trick.

 

Thanks for the pictures! It seems like I can do this. Can you make one more picture with the mod done? And then offcourse, did it work for you?

 

I've just tried it and it works! no system interrupts anymore...
I measured the resistance between pin 4 and ground on the ODD.. it's 570 ohm.
So I just put 620 ohm (didn't have anything closer to 570) between pin 4 and ground on the caddy and replaced the ODD. Now everything works fine. You really don't need that much knowledge about electronics...just find some resistor that is approximately 570 ohm and solder it between the pins. But make sure you don't connect the neighboring pins by accident because they're really close together. You can use a multimeter to double-check the resistance between the pins after soldering.
Thanks a lot to both SteveDW0 and Kueller, I would not have been able to to this without you two!

 

Great! I will have to find the time and facilities then I'm going to try it. THanks for all the explanations

 

Excuse me, do I need to make this fix before installing caddy for my SVS1511 or not?
thanks!!!

 

No, your SVS1511 does not require this workaround. You'll also be able to mod your bios and get better performance out of your GT 640M.

Sony didn't really perfect screwing things up until the SVS1512 with Win 8.

 

1. Even if I'll update my BIOS to the newer version I will have no troubles with CPU usage because of ODD caddy without resistor?
2. If I will install Win 8 will I still have GT640 performance upgrade to be possible?

thanks!!!

hello? Does anyone know?

 

Can someone please put finished product picture

 

Can someone recommend any cover or dummy optical drive bay for this S15? Like the ultrabay travel bezel for thinkpad?

Thanks

 

Quick question:

"Can I use my 1TB hard drive that came with my VAIO with the caddy? I assume it's the same size as the 750GB or 500GB."

 

Thanks SteveDW0 and Kueller for the instructions, you're awesome! But I just registered to disagree with the above quote. I've experienced system interrupts and constant cpu load on SVS1511 VAIO, model SVS1511CFXB, bios R0143C5 1000/1000 MOD, updated to Windows 8. The ODD Caddy board is exactly the same Kueller's. I haven't found SMD resistor, so had to solder big one. Is was rather difficult to fit it in, but now it works like a charm, no cpu load anymore.