Internal hard-drive connection compatibility?

[EccentricRichard]

Hello all - my ancient Vaio PCG-8Y3M has finally packed in and it's looking like the motherboard is the culprit. The cost of a replacement motherboard simply cannot be justified in light of the other issues the machine has, such as its broken screen hinges [the screen is held up with a metal bracket screwed into the case with suitably small screws!), cracked case, non-functioning CD drive and so on. I intend to buy a new laptop in time, but I'd like to get a second-hand machine, out of warranty, with which I can tinker with impunity. Does anyone know if there is any difference between this machine and those of other brands, or even with the newer VAIOs, in terms of the connection between the hard drive and its caddy, or the caddy and the motherboard? Can I just plug the drive into any old machine, VAIO or not? The drive, for what it is worth, is a Seagate Momentus 5400.3, 160GB. These may well seem novice questions to the more experienced members of this forum, but I'd like to learn rather than go making silly and potentially expensive mistakes.

[Syrius]

Hard drives are standardized. You should be able to put it in a laptop of another brand, provided you take it off the VAIO caddy and mount it on the new one's. You may need to blank the HDD and reinstall the OS, btw.

 

Stay away from computers with motherboard overheating issues. I've Had to rePlace many a board due to defficient cooling.

[sfbp]

I've had a related issue that seems to keep cropping up no matter what I do.

 

What make is your printer? I very much enjoy mine (it does a great job) but its software, installed on 2 of my single-CPU machines (1 laptop and and 1 desktop) manages (from time to time) to take over the host machines and spike CPU usage to 100%. Note that on 2- and 4-core machines it may be slightly less obvious as the usage will go to 50% and 25% respectively.

 

This causes all sorts of nasty effects on other programs, of course - anything that requires significant amounts of CPU such as streaming video, or even serving up files for other devices on the network to play video, becomes degraded while this printer software sits in some unintended loop and overheats the CPU so badly I can burn my hand touching the body of the laptop.

 

The only known cure is to use Task Manager (or Process Explorer) to kill the errant task which always restarts magically, this time without hogging the processor.

 

Could something like this be the cause of the overheating? Sounds like things are a bit too late tho......

 

Seagate Momentus drives (at least fitted to anything resembling a PC) should be standard (Apple always does something different). I recommend getting a case to mount it in as an external drive (I just put a 300GB Momentus in one) such as one from Rocketfish. If you buy the right laptop (which is pretty cheap if you go to IBM and buy a refurbished Lenovo, for example) you may even be able to put that drive as a SECOND hard disk on a caddy in place of the DVD, as Syrius mentions. Quite possibly getting all your data off it without reformatting, too.

 

Hope this helps.

[EccentricRichard]

The machine has never been connected to a printer in my ownership. Can I ask, do laptop drives conform to the PATA/SATA connector standard, such that I can connect them up to a PC?

[sfbp]

Different size connector, but yes.

[EccentricRichard]

Different size connector, but yes.

Oh, so if the connector size is different, I can't just plug it into my desktop? I'd presumably need to get a dedicated lead for the thing and plug it into another laptop?

[sfbp]

Type "SATA PATA" into Ebay and you will see some of the converters.

 

Everything was PATA and there exist physical converters from Laptop PATA to PC PATA.

 

Now all is SATA and most often people want to plug these drives into PC's and laptops designed for PATA. But there's also "SATA slim" - for this you need the right (different) caddy. There are also lots of other odd combinations, and each one has an adapter if you can find it. Read carefully before you buy. Also for external connection note that eSATA cabling is different from SATA. Ugh!