Hard Drive Compatibilities

[ninjapenguin981]

Hi there,

Recently the HDD in my Sony VAIO has decided to pack it in. I've tried quite a lot of fixes, but have now given in to having to buy a new one.

My only concern is whether a new one will be compatible with my motherboard and other components.

I've tried to find out what motherboard I have but neither the startup nor lshw in the terminal in uBuntu will tell me anything useful.

Stuff you might want to know:

Broken HDD Specs:

SATA (Type 2 I think)

3.0GBps

5400rpm

3.5 inches

the computer I have is the Sony VAIO VPCEH3C5E (slight custom build) with these specs:

Intel® CoreTM i5-2450M 2.5 GHz

NVIDIA® GeForce® 410M GPU 1GB

320 GB Serial ATA (5400 rpm)

6GB 1333MHz DDR3-SDRAM

I'm running InsydeH2 BIOS if that is relevant.

I was just wondering if you could let me know whether a 7200rpm and/or 6GBps HDD would work or not.
Also if someone could tell me another way to find information about my motherboard that would also be greatly appreciated.

I can't currently get onto Windows, so any solutions would have to be via an externally booted Linux.

Thanks.

[Blencogo · Accepted solution]

Hi ninjapenguin981.

Most Sony motherboards are Sony custom boards.

Your model uses the Intel HM55 chipset which only supports up to 3GB/s SATA transfer rates.

Incidentally, I think you will find the HDD will be 2.5 inches. 7200RPM will work OK.

One word of warning - if you intend to use Sony Recovery Media to reinstall the original Sony OS and preinstalled software, you will need to get a drive with the same specifications as the original drive. This is likely to be formatted with 512KB sectors. Newer drives are typically formatted with 4K KB sectors and will be incompatible with the Recovery Media.

[ninjapenguin981]

Thanks for your reply, I don't intend on using Sony Recovery Media so that shouldn't be a problem.

I measured the HDD with a ruler and found it to be closer to 3.5" than 2.5" unless I'm measuring the wrong dimension? I measured lengthways.

[Blencogo]

Don't ask me why but a 3.5 inch HDD measures 4" x 5.75" and a 2.5 inch drive is 2.75" x 3.945". It is something to do with the first 3.5 inch drives being designed to fit into the racks of the old 3.5" floppy disc drive and nothing to do with the actual size!!.

Anyway, you will need a 2.5 inch drive with form factor 100mm x 70mm x 9.5mm.

[ninjapenguin981]

Thanks for all your help, as per usual with computers the size specifications make no sense at all.