Member Avatar for cuivenion

Hi I'm wanting to replace the hdd in this laptop with a much larger 750gb-1tb drive. The only dimensions I can find for the Vaio hdd is that it's 2.5" 6.35cm sata 1 8mb buffer 5400rpm. Am I ok to replace it with pretty much any other 2.5 form factor hdd sata drive?

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Dani AI

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Useful follow‑up notes and practical checks that complement ’s BIOS comment and ’s cloning experience.

Most modern 2.5" SATA drives will fit and work electrically, but a few practical gotchas matter: check the drive thickness (7 mm vs 9.5 mm) and whether a spacer/bracket is needed, confirm the laptop BIOS sees the new disk (testing it in a USB enclosure first avoids repeated disassembly), and consider updating the VAIO BIOS before swapping hardware. Also be aware SATA III drives are backward‑compatible with older SATA controllers but will run at the older interface speed.

Cloning and post‑clone steps that commonly prevent headaches: make a full image backup first and create bootable recovery media (Macrium Reflect/Clonezilla/Windows recovery). Prefer cloning software that preserves partition alignment (1 MiB alignment on modern disks). After a successful clone use Disk Management or GParted to expand the main partition into the remaining space rather than creating a new system partition. If Windows Update stalls after cloning — as reported here — the usual repair sequence is to reset update components, then check system files and the disk.

Common repair commands (run from an elevated command prompt or recovery console):

net stop wuauserv
net stop cryptsvc
ren C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution SoftwareDistribution.old
ren C:\Windows\System32\catroot2 catroot2.old
net start cryptsvc
net start wuauserv

sfc /scannow
chkdsk C: /f /r

If the system fails to boot after cloning, attempt Safe Mode, run Startup Repair from recovery media, or use bootrec /fixmbr and bootrec /rebuildbcd from the Windows RE command prompt. Final checks: verify partition StartingOffset with wmic partition get StartingOffset, Index (alignment), install chipset/storage drivers, and confirm Windows activation/drivers are intact. These steps align with the issues and resolution pattern shown by and address the BIOS/compatibility caution noted by .

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Member Avatar for rubberman

Physically, any 2.5" laptop sata drive will work. However, a lot of the Sony Vaio hardware has embedded identifiers that the BIOS interrogates and if they aren't Sony "branded" devices, they won't work. The only way to tell for sure is to try one. I know we had issues of this sort with a Vaio that my wife had some time ago.

Member Avatar for cuivenion

Cool thanks for the info.

Member Avatar for cuivenion

Hi, I've gone with this one:

Click Here

I'll let you know how it turns out.

Member Avatar for rubberman

Samsung makes good drives, so if it works, you should be golden... :-)

Member Avatar for cuivenion

Well seems to be working fine. Had a couple of problems (windows wouldn't update). But that seems to be more to do with the cloning process that the disc itself. All seems to be going well now. The disc model numder is ST1000LM024 Samsung for future reference. Pretty Happy.

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