Sony VAIO L Series Hard Drive swap for SSD?

[bellyer]

I hope that this is the right forum for this question. I wasn't sure if maybe it should have gone in the storage forum or somewhere else. I am looking to purchase a Sony VAIO L Series All-in-One PC for my new Windows 8 machine. I found a great one at a great price with the specs that I am looking for; the only problem, in my opinion, is that I would love an SSD instead of the 1 TB 7200 RPM hard drive that it comes with. I have 4 TB of network storage in my house, so sacrificing the 1 TB hard drive in the PC is not a problem in my book. I know that I can custom build the same model machine through Sony's website and can get a 256 GB or 512 GB SSD installed instead, but the price would be about $1000 more to do that than to buy the prebuild model with all of the same specs other than the SSD.

Does anyone know if it would be possible to swap out the hard drive for an SSD on my own on the Sony VAIO L Series? Is the case able to be opened up and the hard drive swapped?

My real desire for having an SSD in the All in One that I am looking to buy is that the one that I have been using in my Asus Zenbook has been so fast and so extremely quiet that I can't imagine using anything other than an SSD again. Although, I have not used an actual hard drive in a desktop PC in quite some time and have never used one as fast as 7,200 RPM before, so maybe the speed and quietness of the hard drives today are much better than what I remember from years ago.

Thanks for any input!

 

[macusn]

Did you download the manual on the Sony Vaio L series and see if it has replaceable hard drive? What does Sony say?

lm

 

[tsnor]

I did not look up your service manual. Replacing a hard drive on a similar all-in-one required removing 15 screws and prying a bezel off with a thin plastic tool. Once you have the PC disassembled swapping the drive is ease. Cloning the content of the drive is also fairly easy.

Suggest you hunt on you-tube for disassembly videos and see if you can do this. The hard drives on an all-in-one are not really set up for end user replace.

Aside: I have 4 SSDs deployed on my pcs. (intel 320 in work laptop, SF 2200 in laptop, SF2200 in wife's desktop and Samsung 830 in laptop). The SSDs make a difference in laptops. I do *not* use an SSD in my server PC -- the faster boot time is mostly irrelevant and I don't really see any other advantage. This is just me, but I do use laptop with SSD and server without on a daily basis and would not replace the raid HDD in my server with SSDs. Not enough gain for the cost $$ and the hassle of a smaller C drive.