Sony Z11 - Two Hard Drives Q

Sorry if this has been addressed before...searched and couldn't find anything. If you get a Z11 configured with one SSD drive, is it possible to later install a second drive on your own? Also, can you install a normal hard drive as a second drive? Like can you get a 128gig SSD drive as a boot drive and then install a 2.5" Hard Drive in the second slot? Thanks guys.

 

Tons on this, not sure how you missed it in your search...

The included drives are proprietary drives. It's possible to put an additional SSD in place of the DVD drive - it's not hard, but you have to take apart the Z to do it.

I like the machine enough to keep it, but the way Sony handles this, in particular the fact that you cannot boot off of the additional drive, almost pushed me to return it.

 

So you can actually have 3 SSD drives if you remove the DVD drive, but it isn't possible to put a regular hard drive in?

If one of these drives fails then I suppose you have to buy an expensive Sony replacement SSD huh?

 

Exactly why I bought a HDD version of the laptop when I was overseas. Any benefits of the Sony SSD drives is overshadowed by the fact that you can't use industry standard parts for replacement when it breaks.

 

I installed X25-E SLC drive instead of optical drive for precisely that reason - I don't trust those MLC SSDs for heavy workloads too much... so I am using them as "data" drive with mostly "read only" data.

 

I can boot off the SSD in the optical drive bay. Are you talking about external drive??

 

I cannot boot off of the SSD I've installed in place of the DVD drive - I can't find any place in the BIOS or RAID BIOS to select it as a boot option successfully. I would imagine I might be able to boot off of it were I to remove the Sony SSDs.

How to do swap between boot drives? I would be extremely happy were I able to do so.

 

The Sony drives are sort of two drives on one board, so the chances of one failing and not the other is pretty remote; even if only one did fail, you'd have to replace the board to get it fixed. This is one argument for the extended warranty (which I still need to buy, whoops).

The SSD I've placed in the DVD bay could have just as easily been a standard HDD; some in this forum have done this. I wanted to minimize sound & moving parts, so went with a third SSD rather than a typical HDD. I also didn't need the extra space.

 

I have both Sony Quad SSD and, separately, Intel SSD in the optical drive bay.

I set the "Optical Drive" as the first boot device. It might help.

BTW, is your current boot drive the Quad/Dual SSD?

 

It always boots from the dual SSD (Dual 128 in mine). If I set it to Optical, it still just boots straight from the ....

Hmm.. as I'm typing this, I'm wondering something. Back in a bit.

 

I took the out of the box Z, did the first boot, changed a few things and then installed the SSD. I immediately used Casper to clone the Sony SSD to the new one.

I'm wondering if maybe this is my problem.. could the new one be pushing the system back to using the Sony ones somehow? XP wouldn't do that, but maybe Win 7 knows it was originally on the other drives? Seems far fetched.

Whether I select the Optical or Hard Drive as the first boot option in the BIOS it seems to boot off of the RAID.

 

I think I know why.

There's a hidden system reserved partition on the Sony SSD. When Windows 7 is installed it searches for the first disk of the computer (in this case the Sony SSD - Disk 0) and creates such partition. It's like a boot manager.

When Windows 7 is loaded the partition tells the OS which disk to boot from. As you only cloned the Sony SSD to the new one, the Drive 0 hidden partition still think the Sony SSD is the boot drive. Therefore you cannot boot to the new SSD.

One of the solutions is to reinstall Windows 7 (make sure you burn the system restore DVDs). Select the new SSD as your boot/primary drive during the installation process. Windows 7 will then create the hidden partition on the Sony SSD and let the OS know the boot drive is the new SSD.

I hope you understand what I am trying to say

 

People who wish to add another drive on top of Sony's built-in SSDs BEWARE:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=476311

Looks like Sony's BIOS will trash CPU ACPI P-State data if you plug-in another drive instead of the DVD... Problem is related to having 5 drives in BIOS (Quad SSD + another drive which is not DVD) - so it is not related to the physical connector itself, but rather to some memory error in BIOS.

This manifests itself as lower battery life, and it is easy to confirm by going to Task Manager -> Performance -> Resource Monitor and then to "CPU" tab. CPU will be always working on 100% frequency even if it is idle.

I am trying to solve this problem now but I am a bit pessimistic that this will be easily solvable without someone fixing the bug in the BIOS itself.

 

Hi, I have another question on top of this, I own the hard disk Z11 version.
I wanted to know if it's possible for me to put another disk ?

Thanks