Sony Vaio VGN-NR21Z Hard Drive Upgrade

Hi

Sorry for the following idiotic questions but when it comes to laptops i no nothing at all

I have the nr21z laptop with standard 250gb hdd. I am starting to notice it to be quite sluggish and want to install a nice zippy SSD along with win 7 64.

My questions are, is it possible for this laptop to house 2 hard drives? So i can add an ssd along side the current 250gb, therefore using the ssd for o/s only and the 250gb for storage?

If it can only take one hdd, are there any forseeable issues with using an ssd with win7 64 with this laptop? Driver issues? ssd's not recognised by bios or something else obvious i may not of thought of?

Cheers for any help.

(I did search but had a hard time trying to sift through the massive amount of posts)

 

It is very unlikely this laptop takes two drives. I don't know for sure but having seen some internal pics and videos of contemporary Sony laptops with similar looking chassis, it's doubtful close to the point of certainty. Those internal views convinced me that the process of swapping a drive in one of these could well be a job for laying down and avoiding. Back off, other parts out and keyboard removed seems very possible. There is a big panel on the bottom of this model so it's worth whipping that off and taking a look to see if the HDD is easily accessible.

A lot of notebook chipsets from that era only ran with SATA 150 rather than the current SATA 300, and if that's the case here even if you get an SSD working OK it won't run at full speed. It'll still be faster than an HDD though. At least initially. It's possible that TRIM won't translate through this older hardware and the SSD would clog up soon enough.

A 7200rpm HDD could be a good solution. They run fairly cool nowadays and there won't be any SSD type compatibility issues. A big lump of space can be had cheap. If a hard disk swap is too much of a nightmare then a fresh Windows installation will speed things up. Even a good defrag can bring wonders if it hasn't been done for a while.

There are notebook optical drive / SSD combos on the distant horizon. If you keep this lapdog that long maybe one of those will fit.

 

You can only have one HDD installed at one time. Its also very difficult to get to the HDD as the service panle underenath only gives access to the ram so more dimantling would be required. If you want the capacity of a hard drive with nearly the peed of an SSD have you looked at the seagate momentus XT. it has a 4GB SSD built in to speed up the HDD and it should work fine on your system.

A hard drive upgrade shoudl definitely make a difference. i used to have the exact same system and the stock drive did get very slow after about a year. a clean install managed to speed it up again so it might be worth a try.

If you really want an SSD and HDD you could look in to running an HDD in your optical drive bay although im not sure what the support for this system is like.