Sony's Flash-Based Notebook Reviewed

Lucas123 writes "Computerworld's Rich Ericson reviewed Sony's first all flash-based laptop, which carries a whopping $3,200 price tag. Ericson says the laptop runs incredibly fast, with an average data transfer rate of 33.6MB/sec and great battery life. But, the laptop is also limited to certain uses. While lending itself to travel, the small capacity of its hard drive doesn't make it a real competitor for a main PC workhorse. 'While there's a lot to like [about the VAIO TZ191N notebook], there's only very limited uses for which I'd recommend this system. The best features — its size and the flash drive — are also its biggest limitations.'"

Space issues

[Jackdaw Rookery (696327)]

The big early adopters for this are Sony, and shortly Apple. I'm betting a Macbook Pro comes out in January that is going to be startlingly similar to this in spec and price.

The big drawback is space, "6GB of that space is taken by a hidden partition (for system recovery) and still more is take by the operating system (Windows Vista Business)." So you are losing 14GB for the recovery, OS and a couple of apps; nearly half the space gone before you start saving things.

Might not be too much of an issue for people saving documents, presentations and so on. For geeks that small amount of space would be very restricting.

Re:

[Josh Booth (588074)]

Yeah, but geeks would probably wipe out Vista and install Linux instead, freeing up most of those 14 GB. Not sure about Linux compatibility, though.

Re:Space issues

[nine-times (778537)]

I think for geeks (and most other people, too), it'll mostly mean that it can't be your main system. If anything, geeks should be able to deal with the idea of syncing to remote servers, working in remote sessions, and things like that more easily than most people.

Re:Space issues

[mstrebe (451943)]

Space is a huge issue with SSD based laptops. This isn't the first Flash laptop from Sony--my UX390N is all flash and almost a year old. I had to take the stupid restoration partition off the flash drive in order to have enough space to install Microsoft Office.

An 8GB restore partition on a 32GB SSD (that costed $600 at the time) means that Sony is using $200 of your money to avoid shipping $1 worth of DVD restoration media. Especially when you consider that the vast majority of that 8GB is all the crapware Sony pre-installs--none of it useful.

Re:Space issues

[heinousjay (683506)]

Real geeks use whatever they want. Geeks with no self esteem try to make cliques.

Re:

[SargentDU (1161355)]

I believe that would be Microsoft.

WARNING: Unsafe Redirect

[sethstorm (512897)]

The url is another obscured shock site redirect.

Re:

[bmo (77928)]

Real geeks don't need on-off switches. They just use arrays of abacuses.

--
BMO

The new oblig.

[r3b00tm0nk3y (806499)]

Yes, but does it run XP?

Re:The new oblig.

[Dare nMc (468959)]

does it run XP?

http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/swu-list.pl?mdl=VGNTZ190NB&LOC=3 [sony.com]
YES, I was actually surprised.
Now get bartPE [nu2.nu] to pair down XP, with openoffice, and firefox to under 1GB, you'll have 31 GB left for data.

Call me old fashioned...

[JamesRose (1062530)]

But I love this idea, I really dislike the currenty "portables" with 17" screens, its just like, not at all actually portable, I mean, I'm really surprised that the laptop industry has gone towards bigger laptops, rather than smaller (but that must be what people want right). I really like the idea of an ultra fast PC which is nice and small to use on the go, and the hard drive is PLENTY as long as you have a good sync program on your main PC and sync regularly, and lets face it, someone spending $3200 on a laptop probably will. But of course, $3200 for a "fast" laptop isnt ever a good investment, because the current progression (and the progression for quite a long time) has been too fast to warrant spending that much on what will very quickly become obselete. The main point is, this is an early adopter machine- very nice, but wont be the best by any stretch of the imaginiation.

Re:Call me old fashioned...

[calebt3 (1098475)]

I'm really surprised that the laptop industry has gone towards bigger laptops, rather than smaller (but that must be what people want right)

I think it is because of the n00b's perception that bigger=more powerful, like how Walmart's Green PC is in a full-sized case when it doesn't need to be.

Re:Call me old fashioned...

[Mantaar (1139339)]

I think the main reason why laptops "grow" is the fact that a lot of people use them as a replacement for a desktop PC. They don't care about its size and they do care about its performance.

And about the WalMart thingie that's bigger than need be: well, packing the hardware tight together isn't exactly easy or cheap + it's harder to cool those cramped spaces. That might be a reason. But that's just a gues..

Re:Call me old fashioned...

[vux984 (928602)]

I'm really surprised that the laptop industry has gone towards bigger laptops, rather than smaller

You can get a device with a screen from 2" to 17" with stops at 3", 4", 5", 8", 12", 13", 15" in form factors ranging from PDA to Tablet to Laptop -- I don't really think the industry has let us down that badly.

Re:

[guruevi (827432)]

Laptops are more and more becoming desktop replacements that you can take on your lap sitting down in your couch or status symbols to people that think bigger is better. Give a 19" laptop with 10 minutes battery and many people would still buy it although there are desktops that both outperform those systems and take less space although less known to the public.

Re:Call me old fashioned...

[PopeRatzo (965947)]

I don't know, 4kg is pretty heavy to lug around all day.

My wife went and bought an EeePC while I was out of town. I was mad at first because she didn't consult me, but when I saw the thing I got all moist. It's really a sweet little machine and perfect for her.

I don't know why this Sony $3000 laptop would be preferable to the little Asus machine. I don't care to read TFA, because I know I wouldn't buy anything from Sony anyway, so actually, the idea that they've got a SSD based laptop for $3k and my wife just bought an SSD laptop for less than $500 from a company I actually likemakes me feel pretty smug.

Since the EeePC has an SD drive, I don't really worry too much about the small storage. As long as it does what it does, I'm happy. More important, my wife is happy. Any of you who are married will understand.

Pricey

[jav1231 (539129)]

So a $3200.00 limited use PC. This should be called the Sony ID-10-T PC.

Re:

[XaXXon (202882)]

And you have an "unlimited use" pc?

Portability is a feature.

Hrm...

[blhack (921171)]

Is it just me...or does an unbelievably fast drive that doesn't store very much data seem kindof pointless? If you are only storing really SMALL files (txt)...then a SUPER fast disk probably isn't your greatest concern.

I understand the power savings..which are awesome....but storing really small files really really quickly just doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Now if this was a web server, or a database, or something like THAT...i would understand...
Especially with a giant price tag like that..

Re:Hrm...

[timeOday (582209)]

Actually low-latency access is exactly what most desktop users really need: quick bootup and fast loading of apps. 0.3 ms is just fantastic. Heck, laptop users have been hailing the advantages of 7200 over 4200 RPM drives for years, compared to this, they're both slow as molasses.

As for servers, you're right... flash seems poised to blow away expensive 15K RPM drives, whose access time is an order of magnitude slower(!) But that doesn't mean all other computers won't benefit, too.

Re:Hrm...

[timeOday (582209)]

Ok, I read your link: "With these mechanisms in place [wear leveling and bad block management], some industry analysts[1] have calculated that flash memory can be written to at full speed continuously for 51 years before exceeding its write endurance, even if such writes frequently cause the entire memory to be overwritten."

Is that supposed to worry me?

Re:Hrm...

[Rei (128717)]

Does anyone actually have any stats to compare flash write limitatons to conventional hard disks? It's not hard to find numbers for flash, but I have trouble finding the numbers for conventional hard disks.

Normal hard disks don't do sector remapping, so your first failure will occur whenever you put too much abuse on a single sector (or when there's a mechanical failure). Modern flash drives have a few million writes per sector before failure, which is reportedly notably less than on a convenctional hard disk. However, flash disks have a clever process in which they track how many writes have been made to each sector; the closer a sector gets to a limit, the less frequently modified data gets put there (it'll move data around as necessary to achieve this). In short, you have to essentially make a few million writes to *every sector on the disk* before you get any failures. Let's repeat StorageSearch's calculation:

Write endurance: 2 million cycles
Sustained write speed: 80MB/sec
Capacity: 64GB

2,000,000*64,000,000,000/80,000,000 = 1,600,000,000 seconds = 51 years.

Is this really a problem? 51 years of continuous writes? Now, there are some nuances to the real situation (there's some write overhead on the disk itself, but then again, you'd need to be doing sequential writes with huge sectors to get that kind of performance), but you get the picture.

Here's the specs for an Mtron 32G SSD [mtron.net], which reports "greater than 85 years assuming 100G / day erase/write cycles" (overwriting the whole disk 3 times a day).

32GB is good space for business

[kbob88 (951258)]

32GB is really a lot of space, especially for business users. Today we don't think it's enough, because we've all loaded our computers up with games, music, and video. But for business users who only use the laptop for storing business documents, it should be more than enough space.

My (old) laptop has 30GB of HDD, and that was plenty of room for 10+ years of business documents, plus numerous programming environments and databases. It only became limiting when I put 13GB of music on it.

For business-oriented 'road warriors' who value speed and battery life over games and media, this is probably a good choice. Especially if they can get their company to fork over the big $$ for it.

That said, I'd wait a year until the price comes down significantly and the space doubles or triples.

Re:

[ACMENEWSLLC (940904)]

I agree. I have an external 160GB drive I carry with me which houses all my media, backups, and other files. It is very small and fits in my pocket just fine. I also have a large size USB thumbdrive with my critical files. You can get 32GB thumbdrives now for around $300US.

I run around 50 commodity PC's as pseudo servers for mundane tasks such as driving neon signs. Cases where a high end server doesn't make sense. These things will run for 4 or 5 years then have a PSU or hard drive fail. One's th

Re:

[camperdave (969942)]

Where is my Acronis/Ghost boot disk anyway?

On the flash drive on your keychain? Where else would it be?

Re:32GB is good space for business

[calebt3 (1098475)]

Wouldn't it make more sense to carry a spare battery?

No reason you can't still do that. Besides the fact that you might not be able to afford it after buying the laptop.

32 Gigs

[TitusC3v5 (608284)]

I love how the articles talks as though 32 gigs is a minuscule amount of space. My current desktop setup involves a machine with 2 40gig drives, one running Windows XP and the other loaded with Zenwalk. The only times I have space issues are when I'm downloading lots of anime, but that's nothing a dvd burner can't remember, and the laptop comes with one.

I don't give money to Sony, however, so I'll be waiting for an Apple variant.

Re:

[PineGreen (446635)]

I don't give money to Sony, however, so I'll be waiting for an Apple variant.

You're right. Sony is evil because of their rootkit, but Apple is soo good, they don't have any DRM whatsoever:, they let you copy the downloaded iTunes to any player you like, back and fort from ipod, they also give you unlimited region changes on DVD player, no DRM whatsoever. It's just pure hippie!

Servers not Laptops?

[Albanach (527650)]

I have to wonder if there isn't more of a market for Flash disk systems in servers rather than laptops.

As flash drives get bigger, shouldn't they present an ideal storage for databases with their extremely fast random reads? The drives can be small, have low power consumption and price is less of an issue in the server market.

What's holding the take up of these drives in the server market? Is it just that they are untested? Is availability of large flash chips still a problem? Does flash still suffer from burnout after x writes and if so isn't that an issue for these laptops?

Re:

[king-manic (409855)]

I have to wonder if there isn't more of a market for Flash disk systems in servers rather than laptops.

As flash drives get bigger, shouldn't they present an ideal storage for databases with their extremely fast random reads? The drives can be small, have low power consumption and price is less of an issue in the server market.

What's holding the take up of these drives in the server market? Is it just that they are untested? Is availability of large flash chips still a problem? Does flash still suffer from burnout after x writes and if so isn't that an issue for these laptops?

Basically because "read" is fast but "write" is slow and limited in the number of times you can write. So the average lifespan of a normal flashdisk is a couple years of use as a data transfer/storage medium or about a day as a swap disk. The technology progresses but that is a limiting factor thus far. So you can boot in 30s but writing 900 meg webserver log files may take some time.

Re:

[hrvatska (790627)]

It might be great for applications that are more read than write intensive. I'm currently working with a mid-size company whose LDAP servers are read from frequently, but not updated that often. A flash disk might be a good candidate in that situation.

Re:Servers not Laptops?

[jrumney (197329)]

Flash has a longer expected life than most hard-drives these days, for all but the most deliberately contrived use cases, so it can't be that.

Re:

[(H)elix1 (231155)]

There is. I got to play with some kit at OOW last week. Bitmicro had a booth [bitmicro.com] with all sorts of HDD's in server form factors and interfaces (SCSI, Fibre Channel, Sata, Pata). While it is not cheap - $20USD/gig? - it is getting better with each price drop. The drives were cool compared to my old fashion disks, so it might already be at the break even point for people who count air conditioning into the cost. I'd love to replace my raptors with a fast, quite, cool, flash based device - just waiting on the

Re:

[mr_mischief (456295)]

Gee, I remember hoping for the day I could buy a hard drive for $1 a megabyte to move data around at 16MBps. Flash drives might be more expensive than traditional Winchester-style drives, but these days it's all relatively cheap. Give it a few years and you'll forget about spinning hard drives about as fast as we forgot about ESDI and MFM.

Oh, and get off o' my lawn, you damn kids.

Schlock Resistant

[ackthpt (218170)]

I'd consider one if it were built for shock resistance. Too many allegedly rugged laptops/tablets are still limited to screens which break or flimsy plastic construction which breaks structurally with normal use.

Flash drive sounds like just the ticket, though.

Re:

[calebt3 (1098475)]

Can it run Linux?
I'm serious about this.

eee pc

[pimpimpim (811140)]

Sorry people, but I'll go for the EEE pc. It will be the first PC I'll buy in 7 years, I've been waiting for it all that time :) It delivers a small, lightweight, laptop with limited capabilities, but still all the features you'd like a computer to have. Also, it is DEAD CHEAP. I recently looked at a site selling subnotebooks from Japan, all where going for 1200 dollars or more. Why would anyone buy those? Normally these machines were limited to upper-management people, but finally any normal person can also buy them, with an EEE and they WILL!!! Sorry if I sound like a fanboy, but if sony would have sold a 300 PC with the specs of an EEE, I would have bought it from them. Knowing Sony, they would have screwed it up badly anyway, using some strange sony-only form-factor (memory stick?). Asus was just the first to come with the right mix, and I hope many will follow.

Here is the DIY version...

[sczimme (603413)]

A company called Addonics has a bootable Compact-Flash-to-2.5"-IDE adapter for sale here [addonics.com]. The Dual-CF model is $21.99. The page shows the adapter populated with CF and installed in a laptop.

I have no connection to Addonics except as a soon-to-be customer.

Re:

[Chabil Ha' (875116)]

The biggest drawback to your solution is that you only get a small hard drive on each channel. If 32GB weren't big enough, the pictured 4GB/per channel is pretty pitiful too.

Here's a better question:

What are the technical limitations of buying a bunch of cheap 1-4GB flash drives (anyone else pick a bunch of those up for stocking-stuffers last weekend?) and basically soldering an array of flash memory?

No ethernet port?

[corsec67 (627446)]

I know it is a laptop, but Wifi just isn't as fast as a gigabit/100baseT ethernet cable, even under the best of conditions, and with a bit of interference can be quite bad.

Maybe they are thinking that because of the small hard drive nobody will ever need to move data quickly?

And, no possibility to make the laptop into a wifi base-station (Yes, I have done this before).

I've had one for a couple months now.

[Pike (52876)]

Bought one (new on ebay for $2800) to replace a Toshiba that cost me $900 in 2002, and it's great. It works for me because I don't play high end video games, and is very snappy and VERY light.

• I love that I can stick it in my little backpack and hardly feel it.
• With wifi on I can get 6 hours of battery life pretty easily, more with it off.
• The screen quality is the best I have ever seen.
• You can burn bootable recovery DVDs and wipe the 9GB recovery partition. With MS Office and OpenOffice installed and a couple GB of music, I have 13GB free.
• Pop it onto the docking station and I have access to an external HD - no need to carry ALL my photos with me everywhere I go.
• The keyboard is a little small but surprisingly not bad. It didn't take me long to find that I prefer hitting Fn-Left/RightArrow for Home/End and Fn-Up/DownArrow for PageUp/PageDown - less moving around for my fingers.
• I don't even know what bootup times are because it just goes into sleep mode whenever I close the lid, takes maybe five seconds to come back up. I think I've done a full reboot maybe four times since the initial "cleanout" (which is the one downside for me - you will spend about a day cleaning up all the garbage and adware that comes preinstalled).

I do mainly writing, php programming, video/photo editing, web design, and of course email/web. You have no idea what a productivity boon it is to be able to take your laptop everywhere with you, whip it out when you want it without worrying about battery life, then just pop it onto a docking station at night to charge just like a cell phone.

Drive life is a worry

[darkonc (47285)]

The one thing that I'd worry about is drive life.

Flash can accept a limited number of write cycles before it starts to fail. This is no big deal for thumb drives, but can start to be a limit for boot/swap drives.

The ext3-users list has had a number of postings about people using flash boot drives finding that they die after a being used for a while. I haven't tracked tha causes of the failures, but it's definitely something that I'd worry about (I expect that mounting the drive 'noatime' would probably help).

If I had a client who bought one of these things I would strongly suggest a stringent frequent backup policy.

Flash!

[achenaar (934663)]

Ahhhhhhhahhhhhh!
He'll save every one of us!

Why go to such extremes?

[iamacat (583406)]

It seams that a notebook using a conventional 200GB hard drive with a 16GB flash cache would be pretty much indistinquisable in terms of battery life and performance. Cost and software complexity can be further lowered by using flash with fast read speed but slow writes. The operating system and some applications can then be installed on the flash partition while user data can go on the regular hard drive.

It seems better to put up with an occasional disk access than not to have an option to store your stuff at all.

Watch the rejoicing...

[Cloud K (125581)]

When Apple comes out with the same thing at an even greater cost :)

Seriously though, this could be the beginning of flash based storage hitting the mainstream in laptops. The capacity is small right now (though how many people really *need* 300GB? Oh right... pr0n...) but I'm sure if it becomes popular, progress will follow at a decent pace.

Re:WTF? Sony for $3k, Asus for $350?

[tknd (979052)]

The Asus was designed to be small and cheap while the Sony was designed to be expensive and powerful. The hardware is quite a bit different: 1.2ghz dual core vs 675mhz single core, 4GB SSD vs 32GB SSD, different screen sizes.

I don't see it as a bad thing because more products = more options = better for consumers. Also more products using SSD = higher SSD demand = more SSD R&D = cheaper and/or better SSDs. If all major PC manufacturers have legitimate products for sale with SSDs, then within a year or two SSD should really start putting pressure on hard drives and become even more affordable.

So I say good for Sony. I won't buy their laptop but if it gets another SSD manufacturer some cash flow then it only means more potential for SSD growth in the future.

Re:

[tknd (979052)]

The chip is rated at 900Mhz and some reviews quote 900Mhz but if you go to here [eeeuser.com] you'll find that people have been trying to figure out how to get it to run at that speed for quite a while. It turns out that the FSB is set to 70mhz making the actual CPU speed 630Mhz (I wrote the wrong number earlier). Other BIOSes are available that have allowed 100Mhz FSB but causes artifacts like waves or stability issues.

Re:

[timeOday (582209)]

For starters, you're comparing 32 GB with 4 GB. That's a factor of 8. 8 x $350 = $2800, which is surprisingly close to the Sony price. The Eee PC is a very cute little product, but you can't touch-type on it, the screen is only 7", and (most importantly) it can't run all the standard business software most people use. They really aren't comparable.

Re:WTF? Sony for $3k, Asus for $350?

[ivan256 (17499)]

You've got a great point. Toshiba wouldn't ever push restrictive DRM on consumers [ehomeupgrade.com], own an RIAA member company [discogs.com], or pay a major studio to adopt their technology after it couldn't gain adoption on its own merits [gizmodo.com]. They've actually got a squeaky-clean corporate reputation. Hugely ethical...

Re:

[calebt3 (1098475)]

I don't. I use Linux.
Yes, I know that is a fairly standard answer around here but that doesn't change the fact that it's true.