Installing a 512 GB Crucial M4 SSD in a VAIO VPCSE190X

[payared]

Hello,

I ordered the following machine for my daughter and I didn't choose an SSD during my order there was on offer some unusual dual SSD with RAID 0 without any explanation as to the purpose and advantages of such a setup. So I went ahead with a hard drive.

Product:

US-VPCSE190X-LBOM

Component:

Internal lithium polymer battery (4400mAh)

Component:

Fresh Start

Component:

Blu-ray Disc™ player

Component:

Intel® Core™ i7-2640M processor (2.80GHz / 3.50GHz with Turbo Boost)

Component:

4GB (4GB fixed onboard + 1 open SDRAM slot) DDR3-SDRAM-1333

Component:

Genuine Windows® 7 Professional 64-bit

Component:

AMD Radeon™ HD 6630M (1GB) hybrid graphics with Intel® Wireless Display technology

Component:

15.5" LED backlit Full HD display (1920 x 1080)

Component:

500GB (7200rpm) hard drive

Description:

15.5" S Series Customizable Laptop

But I've now bought a Crucial M4 512 GB SSD (Crucial 512 GB m4 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive SATA 6Gb/s CT512M4SSD2) which I'd like to install in her latop instead of the hard drive, using the Apricorn SATA Wire Notebook Hard Drive Upgrade Kit ASW-USB-25.

Can someone please tell me:

1) Whether this will work. If it doesn't then I can return the SSD without any problem

2) Whether there are issues I should pay attention to (BIOS? SATA? IDE? Drivers?) - All mysterious to me.

3) What I should do in sequence. Perhaps disable defragmentation before cloning the drive?

Thanks.

P

[Azureal]

That's an extremely complex set of questions! I have done this before on several machines, here is my advice:

1) The Crucial Drive should work without issue in the Sony laptop, the M4 is a fast drive and will make that fast machine even faster.

The Sony may or may not support SATA III (6GBps) but if not, the drive will step down to SATA II (3GBps) and still be lightning fast.

2) In every case of installing SSDs in systems, they were all recognized properly by the system BIOS, some required BIOS tweaks in the settings for the correct drive mode, Windows 7 has all of the drivers you need built right in, there are forums (referenced below) where you can find very helpful guides to installing and optimizing Windows 7 on and SSD. Every machine has its idiosyncrasies with respect to getting an SSD installed and optimized. You will need to find a user group of folks with the same or similar model machines as your own to really get the scoop on the details.

3) I have read in many places that cloning a drive with platters to an SSD is not always a good idea. It will not hurt anything so you could certainly try it, but you may not get the performance you expect because the cloned image may not be proprly "aligned" on the SSD, some cloning software is supposed to be designed to ensure the clone is properly aligned. Installing Windows fresh on the new drive is the optimal method most people use, this sets windows in specific modes with the correct drivers to best handle running from an SSD.

Be patient, in all three cases where I performed this task, it took time to locate the right information and to perform the build, install the apps, and tweak the system for best performance. Once you get it running right, it will fly.

Here is the best resource I have found for working with this technology:

http://forum.noteboo...-manufacturers/

It looks like there are two Sony groups there which will be very useful. Also, some specific SSD related stuff:

http://forum.noteboo...-flash-storage/

Do a search in the notebookreview forums for Windows 7 tweaks, there are a lot of things you can do to reduce wear on the drive as well as disabling things like swap files, indexing etc.

Good Luck!