RC102 - I want to fill up the two remain disk slots, recommendations please

[Zany_Frog]

Hi I have a VGC RC102 which has two empty slots for another couple of HDDs, I was contemplating filling these and wondered what experiences people had re a similar exercise.

There are many types of SATA HDDs around with different specs including size / cache etc, I was wondering what experiences others had and what they would recommend.

[Blencogo]

Hi and welcome to ClubVAIO,

I can't remember anyone here talking about adding HDs to a RC102. That means it's either incredibly easy with no problems or it hasn't been tried!

I suspect it is the latter - when I added memory to my RC102 it looked like a difficult job to get at the drives (they are inside the silver box at the front of your Vaio). I bought an external HD in the end which can also be used with my laptop.

TD4 has added 2 X 400Gb drives to his VGX-XL100 recently and I'm waiting to see how he gets on with his RAID configuration!

Perhaps someone has done it and can contribute.

[Zany_Frog]

Any other contributions, looking for help from someone who has added HDDs to the RC102 desktop

[rich912]

Any other contributions, looking for help from someone who has added HDDs to the RC102 desktop

But thanks for your time and trouble any way Blencogo.......LOL

[kee-lo_]

Charming

[Zany_Frog]

Guys can we limit contributions to those on the subject matter, thanks.

[Zany_Frog]

when I added memory to my RC102 it looked like a difficult job to get at the drives (they are inside the silver box at the front of your Vaio).  I bought an external HD in the end which can also be used with my laptop.:smileyplain:

Actually inserting new drives is very easy, you dont even have to open up the main box. The drives can be accessed by opening the silver panel at the side (there is a push button opening mechanism to the rear of this), so it couldn't possibly be simpler. Well Done Sony!!

Information I am after is which drives have fellow RC102 owners had successes with.

[Blencogo]

Actually inserting new drives is very easy, you dont even have to open up the main box.  The drives can be accessed by opening the silver panel at the side (there is a push button opening mechanism to the rear of this), so it couldn't possibly be simpler. Well Done Sony!

Thanks for posting this info - very useful!

Yes, well done Sony for making the process easy - not so well done Sony for not telling anyone about it in the documentation!

I may give it a try with something like two Samsung SpinPoint P120s in RAID 0 (2 X 250MB X £63) or one Western Digital Caviar SE16 (1 X 400MB X £134).

You may wish to have a look at the current issue of PC Pro - seven SATA HDDs are tested (including Barracuda, Raptor X, DiamondMax11 and Deskstar) from all the major makers and these two come out on top.

[familyowen]

Adding hard drives to RC102

Access to the hard drive bays is via the silver panel on the right hand side. There are two drive caddies. Each caddy can contain up to two 3.5" SATA hard drives. Choice of hard drives depends on RAID configuration. If you just wish to add additional separate hard drives then size is not an issue. If the additional hard drives are going to be part of a RAID volume then there is no point fitting larger hard drives than the originals since the RAID volume is based on the size of the smallest drive.

To fit the drives, remove the data and power cables from the existing hard drives and remove the lower caddy by pulling the handle forward. Insert the new drives and screw in place and replace the caddy using the handle to lock the caddy in place. Replace the the cables plugging them into the existing and new drives.

Power up the computer and use diskmgmt.msc from "start/run" to check the status of the new drives; you should see 2 additional unallocated drives. The options now are as follows:
(a) use Disk Management to format the new drives as two separate additional drives
(b) use the intel matrix storage manager to create a new RAID 0 volume from the new hard drives
(c) use the Sony recovery wizard on the system recovery DVD to create a RAID 5 volume from all four hard drives
(d) use the Sony recovery wizard and the intel matrix storage manager to create a RAID 0 volume form all four hard drives.
Options (a) and (b) are straight forward and do not involve a full re-installation.

Option (c) requires you to make a Sony system recovery dvd, back up your system and then use the system recovery disk to set up the RAID 5 volume prior to re-installing the original software. The Change Raid option on the system recovery wizard allows you to set up
(1) a striped (RAID 0) volume accross 2 drives
(2) a mirrored (RAID 1) volume accross 2 drives
(3) a striping with rotating parity (RAID 5) volume accross 4 drives
(4) a non RAID volume on the first drive.
The original software is then re-installed, including the recovery partition if required. For RAID 5 choose option 3 and follow the instructions. The result is a 480Gb volume whose read speed is slightly faster than the original RAID 0 volume but whose write speed is considerably slower - since each write involves a read and 2 write operations.

Option (d) requires you to make a Sony system recovery dvd, back up your system and then use the system recovery disk to set up a non RAID volume on the first drive. The original software is then re-installed, including the recovery partition if required. For this choose option 4 and follow the instructions. The result is a 160Gb volume containing the recovery partition, a boot partition (drive c) containing the original software and an empty data partition (drive D). Reboot and run the Intel Matrix storage manager. Select "actions" followed by "create RAID from existing hard drives". At this point the storage manager will create a RAID 0 volume accross all 4 drives and copy both the recovery poartition and original software into the new volume on the fly (it can take over an hour to do this).

When the process is complete use diskmgmt.msc from "start/run" to check the status of the new drives; you should see one volume containing a recovery partition, a drive c partition, a drive d partition and an unallocated partition. Using Disk Management you can unallocate drive d and then join up the unollacted space and recreate one large drive d. The result is a 640 Gb volume containg a 7.5Gb recovery partition, a 60Gb drive C and a 572.5Gb drive D whose speed is nearly twice that of the original 2 drive RAID 0 volume.

[BartK]

you can, however there might be a heating issue there. If I'm not mistaken there is no FAN cooling the HDD's on the RC102, so having a total of 4 SATA drives migh generate a lot of heat that might not be easy to get rid of... Ok, the side towards the hole is open, but still...