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]

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

[tknd]

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:Servers not Laptops?

[jrumney]

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

[timeOday]

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]

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:Cheapness is weakness in the case of Asus.

[jargon82]

Thinkpads rock. They're all we use at work, and we have a 3 year replacement policy (our consultants get a new one every 3 years, when the warrenty runs out). The old ones come back for use in training sessions, and better than 90% of them are still in good shape after 3 years of use on the road.
I won't say they never break or have problems, but the support experience is good enough that I don't hear about it, either :)

Re:Hrm...

[timeOday]

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]

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).

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

[tknd]

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:Space issues

[lostguru]

agreed, a small protable machine running something lightweight (not vista) is great for getting things done when you don't have access to a desktop, or when a larger laptop doesn't make sense, it doesn't take a powerhouse for a few ssh sessions or lightweight text editors

true it can't keep up with bigger laptops, but it isn't really designed to

Re:Space issues

[mstrebe]

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:The new oblig.

[Dare nMc]

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.

Re:Call me old fashioned...

[PopeRatzo]

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.

WARNING: Unsafe Redirect

[sethstorm]

The url is another obscured shock site redirect.

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

[Boycott BMG]

Except that it wasn't Sony that installed the rootkit on CDs it was Sony/BMG. Sony/BMG is 50/50 owned by Sony and Bertelsmann with most of the decision makers being from the BMG side. It isn't too much of a surprise really, given than BMG had such a crappy reputation previous to the merger. Sony does hold some blame being a major shareholder, but the ultimate decision was not theirs. If anything Bertelsmann holds more blame than Sony, but no one is suggesting a boycott of Random House, for example. This is all OT anyways.