Sony's Solid State 2.4 Pound Laptop Reviewed 214
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!"
Flash Drives (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Flash Drives (Score:5, Informative)
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)
Still need swap space at 2gb (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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For the past few months, I have had Windows XP running from a 2-gigabyte compactflash card which is plugged into the IDE bus of a diskless machine.
The card is formatted NTFS, and the swapfile (which does get somewhat heavily used on this low-memory machine) lives there, too.
No problems yet. I don't expect any.
I've also got an old 386 laptop running an old version of Slackware from a 512M card. It works fine, with ext2 as a filesystem mounted rw and a modest swap partition.
Most recently, I added
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Possibly a security issue, but not a user issue as you still would have a "sector map" of bad blocks.
Also, as someone else noted a swap partition would be a waste of space. Big ram, no swap. I've run photoshop and premiere, both with no windows swap file, no issue in 2 gig of ram (on XP though so VistaMMV).
-nB
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Swap is good (Score:3, Insightful)
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Completely missing the point.
The point is, an OS is better equipped to figure out what's "unnecessary" than you are.
Let's take, for example, an applet I have in my system tray called KArm. It's a time logger -- lets me punch in and punch out to separate projects, so I can charge an hourly rate.
Right now, I'm not using it at all. Haven't used it for hours. Not likely to for hours. So the ideal thing to do would be to c
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Absolutely you can. I'm writing this on a system with no swap for the last year, running VMWare (with 750 megs of ram allocated to the guest), developing a large software app in NetBeans, running firefox (with about 20 tabs open), gimp, etc. etc... Under linux it's as simple as not putting any swap entries in
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As mentioned in the article, it comes with 2GB standard.
"Of course some of this improvement is no doubt due to the 2GB of memory installed..."
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Solid state disks are memory products, so it's the memory vendors that will be selling them. That means that companies like Transcend and Super Talent are the brands you should be expecting to see.
Re:Flash Drives (Score:4, Informative)
Wear leveling and redundancy (Score:2)
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)
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.
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]
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However the ssd firmwire implements a psuedo virtual filesystem that is hidden that spreads everything apart so writes to the same area of the disk happen less often.
Re:Flash Drives (Score:4, Funny)
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Fast forward to today, and I e-mailed my boss to ask if she ever intends to give it back. I put a couple of videos on it (tot
Why are flash hard drives so expensive??? (Score:5, Interesting)
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???
Inquiring minds want to know. Maybe I can start selling cheapo 16gb solid state drives on eBay for $180 and make a killing
AAA+++++!!! FAST, CLEAR COMMENT, MOD INSIGHTFUL!!! (Score:2)
but, really, good point.
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If you put two of those $140 CF cards in a striped RAID-0 with the dual-card Addonics adapter, you'll have a 32gb solid state disk, with a speed approaching 12 MB/s rate, for about $300 ($280 for the two CF cards, and $20 for the dual adapter).
Certainly cheaper than the 32gb solid-state disk for $430 from Transcend [newegg.com]. And you can upgr
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So a CF/SD SSD would work and be cheaper, but would probably not last very long, and be slower.
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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.
As I see it, the ONLY high-performance way to do write levelling is in software: that is, flash devices should use different filesystem structures from hard disks. In hard disks, fragmentation is very bad, so data should be kept together on the disk. While in flash devices, fragmentation is not an issue, but wear and write granularity are important, so data should be kept in a sort of cyclic log structure.
The author of LogFS, a log-structured flash filesystem, has written a very convincing paper on this
Windows is not compatible with CF hard drives (Score:5, Informative)
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-e
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A Transcend 2GB Industrial Compact Flash with UDMA Fixed Disk Mode feature was used to do a fresh install
Yeah, that would work. But the cf cards that are labeled "Industrial" are much more expensive then a standard CF card, and that kind of invalidates the point. The instructions further down talk about installing to a regular hard drive and then transferring the image to the CF card, which is exactly what I had to do.
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The fact that SSDs are faster has been mentioned, but the other major factor is the size of the market. The market for SSDs is tiny and new, with only a few manufacturers competing. The market for CF cards is vast and mature with zillions of manufacturers competing.
Re:Why are flash hard drives so expensive??? (Score:5, Informative)
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]
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.
Re:Why are flash hard drives so expensive??? (Score:5, Informative)
because they support dma.
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A Few Days or Essentially Forever (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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But for those stuck on Windows which are 95% of users I wonder if NTFS really is an issue in causing unreliability. Non unix filesystems clump everything close. I know you mentioned that ssds use a psuedo filesystem spread apart that hides it in firmware from the os but I wonder what happens if the drive gets full. Also this seems complicated and strange to hide such a virtual filesystem.
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I wonder how much good Linux's "Laptop Mode" would do, with or without the flash wear-leveling...
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All CF cards (and SD and everything else flash-based) now implement wear-leveling inside.
The only time you're going to quickly wear out flash memory by doing something naive is to mount a raw flash memory device using MTD and then using a filesystem like FAT or ext2 right on top of it. But it is just as easy to use JFFS2, so you wouldn't do that, right?
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This doesn't sound too unlikely given even a fairly modest 2 million cycles over 32G of wear-levelled storage makes for over 60PB of writes.
Since we're talking about Vaio's here, (Score:2)
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flacid. (Score:2)
Is flaccid state better?
Ask MicroSoft for assurance and immoral support or consult with Dr. Stallman for a cure.
but (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: wireless issues (Score:5, Informative)
http://linux-wless.passys.nl/ [passys.nl]
http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/joomla/index.p
Between those two, I've never had a problem finding drivers. Maybe you could point your friend in that direction.
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http://linux-wless.passys.nl/ [passys.nl]
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Does Sony actively support running Linux on its hardware, or have they resigned themselves to being just an Apple clone with black plastic?
But (Score:2)
SSDs (Score:4, Insightful)
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!
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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.
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BTW: I have a 1GB system and it's only using 380MB.
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Maxing out the RAM helps too.
£ or lb? (Score:5, Funny)
Light, not cheap (Score:2)
light and cheap alternatives (Score:2, Informative)
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Just a little too spendy at the moment... (Score:4, Informative)
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.)
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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>
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I did about ten years ago and have never regretted it. My younger brother is emigrating to Oz this coming Friday
The 1:1 effective exchange rate is great except I need to buy Sterling so the 1:2 rate applies
The only things I miss in the UK are family, pubs and a decent curry. I travel back annually but ideally it should be twice as often.
The British public are completely to
Re:Just a little too spendy at the moment... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Income in the US in GBP is less than income in the UK in GBP.
Yes, electronics are slightly pricier in the UK as a portion of income, but not nearly as much as the exchange rate would imply, since the wage ratio (normalized for currency) is almost as large as the price ratio (also normalized).
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2.05/1.0 == 2.05 (cost of PS3s if only exchange rate is used).
I'd say that compared to 2:1, 4:3 is relatively similar.
Buttons on the Front? (Score:2)
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
Does it come with a rootkit preinstalled? (Score:2)
Sony is dead to me. (Score:2)
Competition for OLPC? (Score:4, Funny)
Sigh. Remember when. . ? (Score:2)
It's still one of my primary concerns when thinking about portable computers. Why on earth does the reviewer not even mention this? --Especially when we're dealing with a computer with such a different type of technology design which he excitedly claims consumes much less power. Damn, that'd definitely be on my list of things to test, just
I'd like solid-state removable storage, please. (Score:2)
And I'd like the cost/GB to be in the same ballpark as CD-R or DVD-R media.
Re:$4000? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is progress and it means the cheaper SSD notebooks are just around the corner once this technology becomes mainstream.
$200. (Score:2)
$200 laptops are here [engadget.com]. It's small, light and has more horsepower than the five year old PIII I'm using. With GNU/Linux, you don't need a portable super computer.
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So it would be more like $2000 on your side of the pond.
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I had a laptop with a cylindrical battery placed similarly.
Actually, it took a series of cylindrical batteries. I can't remember if they were C cells or D cells.
Come to think of it, that laptop, which ran CP/M on a Z80 processor, also used solid state storage. Technology comes around again to the same thing, I guess.
One day in Biology class I noticed the room was quite hazy. I looked down and realized there was smoke emenating from
Answer me this (Score:4, Insightful)
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I mean, people here whine as if Slashdot has turned into the "Popular Science" of the Internet. Sure, I don't want to see blurbs written by PR flaks, like this one obviously was. But I still want to see cool new hardware.
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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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Well, if you put forth an incorrect opinion because you didn't educate yourself prior to posting, why shouldn't you deserve a -1 mod?
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Anyway, my opinion is not incorrect - it was my opinion about the design of the thing. I still stand by it. Why did you think I was incorrect?
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I think 90% of the posts on here should be modded "-1 Jackass" these days but that's another topic...
I misinterpreted your post. I thought you had been trying to imply that Sony was attempting to mimic the Apple design with the Vaio TZ series. Having had a TX (same design as the TZ) for almost a year before Apple launched their smaller Macbooks, it would have been impossible for Sony to be copying the Mac style.
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Cheers - E
FTFA (Score:2)
From TFA:
Re:Super Sexy?! (Score:5, Funny)
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My wife has a Vaio and its a piece of crap. It has cheap electrical components in it so a simple wireless usb mouse will cause the notebook to overheat. She has to use a cooling pad unless she uses nothing but the touchpad. Also it bluescreens alot mentioning the nv*.dll driver which is the video card. It may have defective video memory. Its slow and it comes with spyware and malware out of the box and the sound is quiet requiring external speakers. Also the mmc ca
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To the extent that filesystems themselves organize in favor of shorter seek times, it's inconsequential. Calculating where to place 16 kilobytes is a drop in the bucked compared to the time to actually write tho
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Here's a select quote: