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Sony's Solid State 2.4 Pound Laptop Reviewed
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!"
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.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
The two greatest resources I've found for finding Linux wireless card drivers are:
h p?/component/option,com_openwiki/Itemid,33/id,list /
http://linux-wless.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.
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.
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
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.
My bicyles
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.
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many of the cf-ide adapters do not have 2 pins connected on either end (I forget which pins they are, but I had to solder them in on a cheap adapter to get our transcends to work effectively. we ended up buying addonics adapters http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_memory_read er/ad44midecf.asp
because they support dma.
This is an issue I have recent and intimate knowledge of.
m bedded-gotchas.html
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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