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Sony's Solid State 2.4 Pound Laptop Reviewed

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Mon Jul 23, 2007 01:11 PM
from the flexible-solid-state dept.
Portables Hardware
An anonymous reader writes "Last week Sony finally launched its super slim, super sexy TZ series of laptops in the US. If you've been waiting to get your hands on one of these, check out this first review of the top drawer TZ12VN, complete with solid state hard disk. It's a lot of money, but it sure looks sweet!"
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Sony's Solid State 2.4 Pound Laptop Reviewed 50 Comments More /

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  • Flash Drives (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Eightyford (893696) on Monday July 23 2007, @01:13PM (#19959089) Homepage
    Anyone know how long do these flash drives last?

    • Re:Flash Drives (Score:5, Informative)

      by SatanicPuppy (611928) * <Satanicpuppy AT gmail DOT com> on Monday July 23 2007, @01:20PM (#19959185) Journal
      Anywhere between 100,000 and 5,000,000 write cycles, depending on the quality of the flash media.

      This may or may not be a lot more than a conventional hard drive depending on abuse; in a perfect world, a conventional harddrive would last much longer, but in a laptop, with all the bouncing, the odds are closer to even.

      Either way, I wouldn't want to keep anything unique on a laptop.

      • Re:Flash Drives (Score:5, Interesting)

        by CastrTroy (595695) on Monday July 23 2007, @01:27PM (#19959293) Homepage
        I think it would be nice if you could just throw 2+ gigs of RAM in one of these things, and disable the swap space, so as not to tax your harddrive. This is probably one of the major culprits for writing lots of data the the hard drive. If you get rid of that, you'd probably greatly increase the life of the drive. Also, with 2 Gigs of RAM, most people would have absolutely no need for swap space.

        • Still need swap space at 2gb (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Weaselmancer (533834) on Monday July 23 2007, @01:36PM (#19959459)

          Also, with 2 Gigs of RAM, most people would have absolutely no need for swap space.

          Not so sure about that. The article did mention it came pre-installed with Vista, FYI. And the reviewer said he uses Photoshop on it.

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by MindStalker (22827)
          From what I understand for flash based memory that the number of writes is sector based. Meaning you can write to each sector X number of time. A swap partition would probably be a good idea, with an understanding that once you've burned through that partition you need to look at other options, but this way your not risking the rest of your data.

          • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

            by Anonymous Coward
            Basically every modern flash device has wear leveling. As I understand it, this means that putting swap on a separate partition will do absolutely nothing to protect your data if the flash drive gets so worn that it starts to wear out.
        • Because as we all know 64k memory ought to be enough for anybody.
        • Swap means that stuff that genuinely is NEVER used can be swapped out and forgotten about. That means more space for a disk cache or a write buffer, which, in turn, means fewer writes to the disk.
      • Are any companies selling flash hard disks in a 2.5" or even a 3.5" SATA or ATA form factor retail, or is it an OEM-only product? Other than IBM selling a 15.8 gig drive for around a grand, I've seen a few companies that I've never heard of before selling these, but that seems to be basically it.
      • ... are the two main ways to fight the finite write cycles.

        Wear leveling essentially distributes writes to a frequently-accessed logical sector to multiple physical sectors. Without it, cheap flash cards would barely survive ~10K pictures (they use the FAT filesystem, btw). Redundancy - it simply means that there are more physical sectors than logical ones, to transparently replace dead sectors.

      • Re:Flash Drives (Score:5, Informative)

        by Jah-Wren Ryel (80510) on Monday July 23 2007, @02:39PM (#19960339)

        Anywhere between 100,000 and 5,000,000 write cycles, depending on the quality of the flash media.

        This may or may not be a lot more than a conventional hard drive depending on abuse; in a perfect world, a conventional harddrive would last much longer, but in a laptop, with all the bouncing, the odds are closer to even.
        No, it is pretty much many, many years longer than a spinning disk of equivalent size. In summary, at the absolute worst case of continuous streaming writes at maximum throughput it will take roughly 25 years to fail.

        Another benefit that flash has over spinning disk is that almost all failure modes are at write time, so the hardware can detect the error and write to a spare flash cell without the user experiencing any problems. Error detection on rotating media is almost always at read-time, usually long after it is too late to recover from.

        See here for the gory details. [storagesearch.com]

    • Re:Flash Drives (Score:4, Funny)

      by jollyreaper (513215) on Monday July 23 2007, @01:56PM (#19959731)

      Anyone know how long do these flash drives last?
      Not long underwater. Don't ask.

    • Why are flash hard drives so expensive??? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by MoxFulder (159829) on Monday July 23 2007, @02:16PM (#19960025) Homepage
      Why are flash hard drives SO EXPENSIVE? It's $300 for a 16gb 2.5" IDE drive [newegg.com] on Newegg!!!

      On the other hand, a 16gb CompactFlash card is only $140 [newegg.com]. And the CompactFlash interface is electrically identical to IDE/PATA, so you can use a $5 mechanical adapter [ebay.com] to connect a CompactFlash card to your notebook's hard drive bay.

      What am I missing here???
      • I can make my own 16gb solid-state IDE disk for only $150 (and 32gb CF cards are coming out in a few months).
      • Does the $300 Transcend solid-state disk include any additional caching features or other speed-up? (the web site doesn't say: http://www.transcendusa.com/Products/ModDetail.asp ?ModNo=164&SpNo=3&LangNo=0 [transcendusa.com])
      • Are the 32gb disks anything more than just a little RAID0 chip with two 16gb CF cards attached?


      Inquiring minds want to know. Maybe I can start selling cheapo 16gb solid state drives on eBay for $180 and make a killing :)

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by danbert8 (1024253)
        The flash disks have much higher transfer rates. That $140 CF card is only 40x. If you can live with slow transfer rates, go for it. You'll still get quicker access times than a hard drive. You win some, you lose some.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by llZENll (545605)
        The main difference are the write/read cycles the drives can take, SSDs have built in algorithms to evenly spread the writes out over the disk over time, which greatly increases the life of the disk, granted you could probably do this in software, but its another thing to deal with. Standard CF/SD memory can only take a few hundred thousand cycles, which as a system disk is gone in a very short time.

        So a CF/SD SSD would work and be cheaper, but would probably not last very long, and be slower.

      • Windows is not compatible with CF hard drives (Score:5, Informative)

        by bflong (107195) on Monday July 23 2007, @04:11PM (#19961715) Homepage
        This is an issue I have recent and intimate knowledge of.
        XP will *NOT* install on a standard CF card. Even with a CF/IDE converter, Windows sees the CF card as a "Removable Device" and will not install to it. Windows also will only ever see one partition on a removable device. It's also broken when trying to format an existing partition during install, and it corrupts itself when trying to expand it's C: partition when installing from a sysprep'ed disk image. The only way I was able to get it installed was to create a sysprep image the exact size that the finished install will be and write it directly to the flash drive. It's kind of funny to double click on "My Computer" and see the C: drive show up as a removable device with a little removable type icon. This guys blog details the issues a bit more:

        http://thebs413.blogspot.com/2005/12/windows-xp-em bedded-gotchas.html [blogspot.com]

        • Re:Why are flash hard drives so expensive??? (Score:5, Informative)

          by MoxFulder (159829) on Monday July 23 2007, @02:36PM (#19960305) Homepage

          make sure your cf-ide adapter supports dma transfers.
          The CF-IDE adapter is simply a passive mechanical adapter... nothing more than a connector between the pins of the CF card and the pins of the IDE header.

          However, you bring up a good point: if the CF card doesn't support DMA, it will be quite slow. The one I linked to apparently doesn't support DMA [newegg.com] :-( Anyone know what the prices are like for 16gb CF cards that do support UDMA mode 4? An 8gb CF card supporting DMA costs $110 [newegg.com]... and it is made by Transcend. It sounds like they may be the leading maker of CF cards that support DMA.

          Hopefully other manufacturers will catch up quick, since DMA capabilities don't depend on the raw NAND flash chips, only on the controller chip... so the cost to manufacture a CF card supporting DMA should barely increase.

    • A Few Days or Essentially Forever (Score:5, Informative)

      by arrianus (740942) on Monday July 23 2007, @02:25PM (#19960163)
      Flash media will typically have about 100,000 read/write cycles before failing. It's sometimes advertised as millions, but practically, no one makes media that goes over 300k, and no one makes media that goes under maybe 10k. Used naively (e.g. CompactFlash in an IDE-to-CF adapter as your / partition), the time to failure is on the order of days. Log files, file access times, and bits like that get written over and over and over, with some files being touched every few seconds. You've got 86,400 seconds in a day, which is in the same ballpark as flash endurance. I've seen drives fail this way.

      Used properly, however, a SSD will last forever. Typically, the drive will include load spreading somewhere in the chain. The algorithms are a bit more clever than what I'm about to describe, but naively, if you've written the same location more than a few times, you move that data to a different location. This are often implemented in the drive's firmware, but may also be implemented in the file system (Linux comes with a few flash file systems that do this -- indeed, OLPC uses one of them). Used this way, the solid state drive will last for many decades of continuous use before failing, and will eventually fail for the same mechanisms as any other old IC. A 40GB drive, written at 100Mbps, will take about an hour to overwrite completely. With an endurance of 100,000 cycles, you get a bit over 10 years of continuous write at that speed before you run into endurance limits. With normal write frequencies, that means it'll last essentially forever.

      Data is stored as charge on a conductor surrounded by insulator, but the insulator isn't perfect, and eventually, electrons do drift on and off. As a result, data stored in flash has a lifetime on the order of 10 years if it doesn't get refreshed. Of course, refreshing it is trivial (read out data, write it back).

      Of course, with a Sony laptop, the major question isn't drive lifetime, but how long until the hinges or latches break. Sony laptops typically frequently have mechanical failures within a few months of purchase. Sony skims on quality quite a bit, these days, and is mostly running on reputation for quality acquired many years ago. That, combined with shooting for the lowest possible weight (and skimming on construction quality to save weight too) makes for pretty flimsy laptops.
  • Wouldn't it be more appropriate to call them "flimsy state" devices, rather than "solid state"?

  • but (Score:5, Funny)

    by thatskinnyguy (1129515) on Monday July 23 2007, @01:15PM (#19959121)
    Will it run linux?

  • SSDs (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Nimsoft (858559) on Monday July 23 2007, @01:16PM (#19959129)
    It's good we're finally starting to see SSDs starting to ship as an option in notebooks. Mechanical hard drives have served us well but I for one can't wait for the speed and reliability increases we're going to see in the future with Solid State.

    How much time do you spend each day waiting for your drive to stop churning? The hard drive is certainly the weakest link in my system when it comes to performance!

    • How much time do you spend each day waiting for your drive to stop churning?
      Install more RAM

      The hard drive is certainly the weakest link in my system when it comes to performance!
      See above

      Seriously, for most people, 512MB of RAM isn't enough on a laptop.
      My computer savvy friends all have >1GB
      My non-savvy ones sit around waiting for their HD to stop churning.
    • Current SSD drives are a little faster than the 1.8" drives. 2.5" drives are still faster than SSD drives.

      Maxing out the RAM helps too.

  • £ or lb? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Eudial (590661) on Monday July 23 2007, @01:18PM (#19959167)
    Either this is a very cheap, or a very light laptop.

  • Just a little too spendy at the moment... (Score:4, Informative)

    by TripMaster Monkey (862126) on Monday July 23 2007, @01:21PM (#19959199)
    Glancing through the description, I saw the prices quoted, and thought "heck....that's not too bad...".

    Then, I noticed that the thing in front of the numbers wasn't a dollar sign...it was a pound sign. :(

    (Just for reference, the current exchange rate is: 1.00 GBP = 2.05749 USD.)

    • Glancing through the description, I saw the prices quoted, and thought "heck....that's not too bad...".

      Then, I noticed that the thing in front of the numbers wasn't a dollar sign...it was a pound sign. :(

      (Just for reference, the current exchange rate is: 1.00 GBP = 2.05749 USD.)

      Yes, but that's not the effective exchange rate, which we all know is 1.00 GBP = 1.00 USD.

      Welcome to rip-off Britain. </bitter>

    • Re:Just a little too spendy at the moment... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Red Flayer (890720) on Monday July 23 2007, @01:40PM (#19959509) Journal

      (Just for reference, the current exchange rate is: 1.00 GBP = 2.05749 USD.)
      Hardware prices don't necessarily exchang along with the cash exchange rates.

      For example (using another Sony product) the PS3 released at GBP 425 for the same unit that cost USD 599 in the US. Exchange was more along the lines of 1.9 at the time, but even so, the US-purchased machine was far cheaper after currency conversion.

      I expect the US pricing for this laptop to be significantly under $4000 USD.

      I know, everyone jokes about the 1.0000 exchange rates for electronics (and beer, FWIW) -- but they don't necessarily mention the wage exchange rate. As a percentage of income, the pricing on electronics is similar in the US and the UK.
  • Uhh... my sources tell me that a laptop with projecting front buttons is asking for them to break. EVidently, the most common injury to a laptop is a hard landing. Since we tend to carry them with a thin side pointing down, they land there. And buttons break.

    Or so I'm told. I always break my laptops through heat death, which cooks connections and fries batteries, resulting in cancer of the motherboard before the third birthday. So my questions are: A) how hot does it get? and B) how long does it last on a

  • Competition for OLPC? (Score:4, Funny)

    by johnw (3725) on Monday July 23 2007, @02:54PM (#19960609)
    Even with the current very weak dollar, 2.4 pounds sounds like a lot less than 100 dollars.

    • Re:$4000? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Nimsoft (858559) on Monday July 23 2007, @01:23PM (#19959229)
      Sure, it's not exactly worth it yet unless you've got the money anyway or specifically require a small, lightweight machine with a Solid State drive, however this is still good news regardless.
      This is progress and it means the cheaper SSD notebooks are just around the corner once this technology becomes mainstream.
    • The thing you have to realise about the UK is that electronics over here just take the dollar price and put a pound sign in front of it. That's right. We pay double for everything. Fuck that shit indeed.

      So it would be more like $2000 on your side of the pond.

    • If my memory serves me right, Compaq Armadas were the first laptops to place the battery there.
    • Just from a quick glance at the article, I couldn't figure out how long the battery actually lasts. Just that it has improved over some other model. How many hours does this thing actually get? I am not going to spend a lot of money on a laptop, till I get one with reasonable battery life. Something over 8 hours would be really nice. Until then, $4000 for a laptop is just too much. Sorry if I'm expecting too much, but with all the advancements they've made in laptops in the past 10 years, they still h

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Xybre (527810)
      I know, this is Slashdot and no one RTFA, but the article did state that Vaio had a lot of those features first, and Apple later copied them. Is this really a surprise?

      Additionally, the specs for this laptop, what with the solid state drive, the led backlighting, and the carbon fiber construction, Apple has nothing that compares, their machines are different, but they'd be at least as expensive if they used all these features, and I'm sure more.

      Keep in mind I'm typing this from an iMac and I have a boycott

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