Sony Z series 2nd harddisk

Hello all...

I can't seem to find anything here or on the sony website. Is the optical bay on the Z555 modular? If so can anyone point me to a tray for substituting a 2.5inch HD for the DVD.

Thanks
Doug

 

I asked a sony rep before I bought the Z and he stated that they did not offer a HD kit to replace the DVD.

 

Thanks.

I guess the next question would be has anyone tested a hard disk interfaced through firewire vs esata on the express card port?

In my own tests I found firewire to be about 2x the speed of USB with no other devices attached.

Doug

 

I would really, really like Sony to offer the same option as they did with my TZ. Having a lovely snappy SSD AND a large capacity HDD is the way forward. It works very well in my setup.
I have an external bus powered USB DVD drive, for the very few occasions that i need it. And the extra USB socket on the right hand side is very, very useful.

I'm really starting to want/need the extra processing power and RAM of the Z, My little, lovely TZ just isn't quite up to the job.

Pleeeeaaaase Sony, can we have this option???

 

Looks like a 9.5mm sata optical drive. In which case consider a newmodeus 9.5mm sata optical bay caddy. The front faceplate comes off, so you could run it without it, or dremel it to approximate the shape.

 

I just installed a second SSD in my Z by taking out the DVD drive. I got a harddisk caddy for lenovo T400. However, the caddy cannot fit in the space as the original DVD drive had tailor-made for sony and its size is a bit different from normal 9.5mm sata DVD drive. At the end, I disassembly the Caddy and take out the interface broad to convert the slim SATA interface to SATA interface of my SSD. Then, I use some sticky tapes to hold my SSD and the faceplate of the original DVD drive. The outlook of my Z is the same and I have two intel X25m in my Z.

 

Often the faceplate is different, but the mechanism is still a 9.5mm sata DVD drive. If so, then the newmodeus 9.5mm sata caddy has detachable faceplate so the rest chassis can fit where a 9.5mm optical drive would fit. The ebay 9.5mm sata caddy doesn't appear to have a detachable faceplate.

 

I'd say in the future it's going to be the exact opposite. SSDs are getting increasingly bigger and decreasingly expensive. HDDs are going the way of the dodo.

 

To make use of every possible space, the DVD drive in Z is different from normal 9.5mm DVD drive. It seems that it is a 9.5mm drive without a chasis. Hence, its size is smaller than a standard 9.5mm caddy and you cannot fit a standard caddy into that space.

 

could somebody please upload the pics with the modded z which have second hdd or ssd installed

 

I didn't take any picture of my mod. However, someone in the forum had mod their z using slim SATA converter cable. You can find some pictures here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=315001&page=3

I think that my mod is a bit better. I didn't use any converter cable described in the thread. I just used the interface circuit broad taken from the T400 caddy and I didn't need to modify any cables. You can easily get a T400 harddisk caddy from eBay for around US$15.

The performance of the second hard disk has no difference from the first hard disk. You can see the attached performance benchmark of my SSD installed in the second disk space.

 

Is this possible with the Vaio SR? with the whole HDD-optical bay caddy?

Is it possible at all to swap the faceplate from Sony's OEM Optical Drive tothe HDD-optical bay frontplate you mentioned?

 

Let me clarify again on my mod:
- I just used the interface circuit board of the Caddy as a converter to convert the slim SATA interface to the standard SATA interface. I didn't use the whole Caddy as it cannot fit in the space.
- The faceplate of my caddy cannot be removed. Anyway, I didn't use the whole caddy and thus I didn't need to replace the faceplate.
- I use sticky tape to fix the second SDD drive in the right position.
- I took out the faceplate of the orignal DVD drive. I used double side sticky tape and single side tape to put it back to the original position; in order to fill the opening left by the original DVD drive.

I believe that you can use the same approach to replace your DVD drive with second hard disk in SR. I don't know whether you can put the whole caddy in the SR but I think that it is unnecessary. Most of the caddy cannot change the faceplate. Even the faceplate can be changed, I don't think you can replace that with the Sony DVD faceplate. At the end, you still need to use tape to fix your caddy and faceplate.

 

The advantage of being able to use the caddy as a whole is you can pull it out allowing hotswap between it and the optical drive on demand IF you are using a primary bay HDD or SSD. There's a great piece of sofware called hotswap! to help you do that very easily.

If you can take measurements of the optical drive I can measure the newmodeus 9.5mm caddy to help identify if it can be fit. It's faceplate can be removed.

 

Forget hotswap using a caddy in Vaio Z. Sony didn't design Z in this way. Firstly, the DVD drive connects to the motherboard using a flex cable. You definitely cannot hotswap a drive using a flex-cable. Secondly, Sony uses screws to fix its DVD drive. For hotswap design, you need to use a latch mechanism to hold the drive. Then you can use a switch to release the DVD and replace it with a caddy. I ever owned a Fujitsu S/6520 and thus I understand the hotswap design.

 

For systems like my HP 2510P, the 9.5mm optical drive connects to a fixed connector (JAE50) in my case. Since it's a snug fit, I haven't bothered to secure it with screws at all and unless I'm completely careless, the optical drive won't move. No need for any latch mechanism at all.

I would assume too you've had a JAE50 or SATA connector on the end of your optical drive. If it slides into your flexible cable connector that's affixed firmly with the connector being somewhat durable, then hotswap may be a possibility. Worth looking at the interconnects in detail.

 

It is probably not easy to find a way to hold the flex cable connector firmly. In addition, we need to make sure that the solution can be reverted; just in case we need to return the notebook to Sony for warranty repair. Anyway, I am happy with my current mod. If anyone can build a hot swap system for Z, this probably will be the first one in the world. I hope that he can share this mod with the forum so that we can learn from him.