I have a Vaio PCG-K23 laptop. About 5 years ago I replaced the hard drive for two reasons. I was getting intermittent read errors and I wanted to get a larger drive. The original drive was a Hitachi Travelstar 60GB. I replaced it with a Samsung 160GB drive. The extra space came in handy but for some reason, the drive would not operate in DMA mode which made it extremely slow. It took about 10 minutes to boot. I found this website
formatting link
which pretty much explained the problem. If you scroll down that page to the message that begins with, "For those with the ALi M5229 IDE Controller," there is a driver that you can download, IDE4008.exe (though now the link is dead). I installed the driver at the time and it certainly helped. The boot time dropped to less than 4 minutes. Still slow but not too bad. The main problem I have using this driver is that it has disabled the hibernate option. I cannot find a way to re-enable it. I'm guessing it has something to do with the fact that this new driver is listed as a SCSI/RAID host controller in the device manager. Long story short, I was wondering if using a smaller hard drive would allow me to use the original HDD driver, restore my hibernate function, and also take advantage of DMA mode. The larger drive will only work in PIO mode with the original driver.
Thanks for your reply.