Sony Vaio UX 64GB solid state upgrade

posted Dec 16th 2008 2:01pm by Caleb Kraft
filed under: classic hacks, pcs hacks

sony_upgrade

This Sony Vaio UX50 came with a 30GB hard drive from the factory. This hacker wanted to do an upgrade and move to solid state, so he started hacking away. He ended up with a total of 64GB of solid state storage crammed into the computer. The hard drive was replaced with a 4GB compact flash drive and the rest is spread through out the device. Apparently any crevice or crack in the Sony UX50 can have memory shoved into it. He managed to somehow get 60GB of storage in there through various USB extensions and adapters. Notice the sticker on the inside of the case. Is this the latest fad? Decorating the inside of the unit where only you know it exists?

[thanks Jorn]

Comments [24]

tagged: sony vaio, ssd, storage

Reader Comments

Why was the harddisk removed anyway? It didn’t seem to free up any space needed by the other mods. Also, why go with only 4GB CF card in the internal slot instead of the 16GB, when this is by far a lot faster than the external slot, as well as being the boot drive?

Posted at 2:31 pm on Dec 16th, 2008 by tom61

Horrible implementation of a decent idea. Not only he moved to something likely slower than the hard drive, but he’s also stuck with many volumes of various sizes. Doesn’t seem all that practical to me.
Oh but sure, I guess it’s shock resistant…

Posted at 2:43 pm on Dec 16th, 2008 by polobunny

Every single PSP that I ever took apart or repaired for someone got a little bit of Graffiti by me put inside of it. Or I’d put my initials and the date it was opened. Even sent one to some and got back a Hello Goo on the inside. Oh the wondrous and funny thing tinkerers do.

Posted at 2:47 pm on Dec 16th, 2008 by SOOPERGOOMAN187

edit: Even sent one to some and got back a Hello Goo on the inside.

the “some” in that sentence was supposed to be sony but my spell check messed it up.

sorry to double post

Posted at 2:49 pm on Dec 16th, 2008 by SOOPERGOOMAN187

WOW THAT STICKER… WEEABOO IN THE CLOSET? NO I GUESS ITS AN ALRIGHT HACK CERTAINLY BETTER (OR AT LEAST MORE APPLICABLE) THEN THE LAZY KNITTER

Posted at 3:41 pm on Dec 16th, 2008 by kyle

Kyle, that knitter was great, we can’t help it if you don’t appreciate knitting (or winding anything in the pattern that machine uses).

I don’t know about this hack, it is kind of neat in a way, but it is just extreme overkill.

Posted at 4:01 pm on Dec 16th, 2008 by nubie

Genius; pure Genius; +op Phyx

Proud of you man!

Posted at 4:13 pm on Dec 16th, 2008 by Phinneus Fog

cool mod,but to go that far is kinda overkill

Posted at 4:17 pm on Dec 16th, 2008 by jason

i have to agree that having a bunch of small drives is pretty impractical – i hate having more than 2 fixed drives on any system, its a pain in the ass to keep track of everything (imo).

and the sailor moon sticker kills it for me.

Posted at 4:54 pm on Dec 16th, 2008 by xrazorwirex

Can he even RAID that?

Posted at 5:04 pm on Dec 16th, 2008 by DanAdamKOF

This is getting to be a bit ridiculous…. that looks bearly even hack worthy.

Posted at 6:22 pm on Dec 16th, 2008 by zeroxeal

Some facts:

Big improvement in battery life

The Sandisk Extreme IV CF card is MUCH faster than the old 30Gb drive and easily big enough to boot XP from. It’s also a lot faster than the no-name 16Gb CF Card in the “crippled speed” PIO slot.

Google a 64Gb SSD drive in 1.8″ form and you’ll see why it was done this way.

All of the cards can be upgraded in size as larger cheap cards become available.

This ISN’T my hack, I just posted it and I think it’s brilliant.

Posted at 6:28 pm on Dec 16th, 2008 by Jorn

This is a brilliant hack, I love it when people try to optimize the packing efficiency of an engineered device.

Posted at 7:22 pm on Dec 16th, 2008 by Solenoidclock

i do like the 4 micro sd card reader at the very end. it was really kinda neat.

Posted at 7:50 pm on Dec 16th, 2008 by camerin

how is cramming a bunch of flash drives into a device “brilliant”? am i missing something here? geez, it’s like someone dug a hole in a sandbox and all the kiddos are crowding around admiring it. not to talk down to anyone specifically, and i’m not saying the hack is bad at all, but seriously, i don’t see why it merits so much attention.

Posted at 9:02 pm on Dec 16th, 2008 by andrew

would it be possible to do this to a tx2500? i want to try and do this for my next laptop. i don’t want to buy a sony…

either this http://variableghz.com/2008/11/hp-pavilion-tx2500-review/

or a toshiba of some kind; any recommendations?

Posted at 10:20 pm on Dec 16th, 2008 by laura

linux with unionfs => one big volume

Posted at 3:07 am on Dec 17th, 2008 by jack

I see what’s being done, there’s just a _lot_ of it going on.
A compact flash card does indeed work for something like this, but if there are many reads/writes going on it’ll reduce the life of that card. (easy enough to back up, eh? ;) )
If the thing has 2gb of RAM and they’re running Windows they can turn off the swap file, which will help quite a bit. (not sure how vista handles that, sorry.)

My question is if the system itself is taxed in any way by having all those USB flash memory devices plugged in all the time?
I’d like to see some benchmarks.
I’m sure it works great, but I wouldn’t want the management hassles of all those drives either.

I have a netbook that I’ve installed a 16gb USB flash drive inside of as well, but I hesitate to install a hub or additional devices because of concerns over system resources.

Looks like it all came together pretty well though. Congrats on the successful mods!

Posted at 6:42 am on Dec 17th, 2008 by strider_mt2k

Reminds me of when I crammed 14 narrow SCSI disks in my ‘486 tower.

Posted at 7:03 am on Dec 17th, 2008 by Steve Shockley

Laura,

The idea of this hack was to INCREASE the storage and improve the batt life at a reasonable price, the HP TX2500 you mention has a 250Gb SATA HD so you’d be losing a lot of storage there.

RE: Recommendations, if you can get something made by a Japanese company with an extended warrantee you can’t go wrong. Toshiba are VERY good as are Fujitsu, I’m not a Sony fanboy however, they are overpriced. Whatever you get, if you “Upgrade” it to XP or Linux you’ll get a lot more speed.

Posted at 7:03 am on Dec 17th, 2008 by Jorn

Meh, I could see swapping the HDD over to one or two LARGE CF cards, But thats it. I’d just as soon do without the space as to have it scattered out over 37 small volumes. But to each his own…

Posted at 7:23 am on Dec 17th, 2008 by Clay

If it was a good idea or not just the fact that it could be done is why I like it.
I have an old laptop with a 4gig cf card and xp installed. I originally used one for school but found out that I was getting 2x more battery life out of it (8hrs). Also it was very quiet and cool without that hard drive. Now I have several laptops & tablet pcs all with ssd or cf cards.
Something else you can think about… With no moving parts you can drop a cf/ssd card from a distance without it breaking.

Posted at 2:21 pm on Dec 17th, 2008 by paul

Replacing all the 8Gb flash cards with 16Gb ones would be the easiest way of squeezing a little (or a lot) more out of the space.

Posted at 3:28 am on Dec 18th, 2008 by alan

Wow, this is cool. How much did it increase the battery life?

Posted at 2:18 pm on Dec 18th, 2008 by simon

Sony Vaio UX 64GB solid state upgrade

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