contactdarin

Greetings,

I was surprised when I opened the Vaio AR25GP and found that it has a primary and secondary SATA drive bay. When I purchased this computer it was my understanding that the higher spec model (1st one to have blueray) would also be capable of dual HDD with RAID configuration. However, that model was much too expensive. I thought the model I purchased AR25GP would only have a single internal drive bay.

I contacted Sony to determine if the secondary drive bay was active. Sony tech support told me that only the AR28GP was factory capable of dual HDD plus the AR28GP was configured for RAID. Then, the tech person goes on to say that the AR25GP and AR28GP use the same chassis but the secondary drive bay on my unit (AR25GP) is not factory supported and would require opening the unit to connect power for the bay to be active. Then refused to explain anything further as this was not factory supported.

Well having a look at the bay and internal wiring, the bay has a single wiring harness that would appear to provide data and power to both drive bays. Therefore, I would expect the bay to be operable. At the moment, I do not have a spare drive to test the secondary bay.


Here are my questions:

1) Has anyone successfully used the secondary HDD bay on the AR25GP?

2) Do you have any advice regarding driver and/or hardware configuration changes?

3) As purchased, a 200GB drive is installed in the primary bay. My intention is to install a 250 - 300 GB drive in the secondary bay for creating an image of the primary drive, plus some additional storage. Are there any obvious issues with this hardware configuration?

Thanks,

Darin