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Sony's Solid State 2.4 Pound Laptop Reviewed

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the flexible-solid-state dept.

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!"

8 of 214 comments (clear)

  1. Flash Drives by Eightyford · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Anyone know how long do these flash drives last?

    --
    Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
    1. Re:Flash Drives by CastrTroy · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    2. Re:Flash Drives by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Yep. They should just have a slot so you could stick in a 2GB micro-sd card as a sacrificial swap partition. Those things are getting so cheap that by the time you need a new one, it won't be that bad at all to buy another to slap in there.

  2. Still need swap space at 2gb by Weaselmancer · · Score: 3, 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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    Weaselmancer
    rediculous.
  3. Re:design . . . by Xybre · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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 going for Sony. ;)

    --
    Eternity is a time bomb.
  4. Why are flash hard drives so expensive??? by MoxFulder · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Why are flash hard drives SO EXPENSIVE? It's $300 for a 16gb 2.5" IDE drive on Newegg!!!

    On the other hand, a 16gb CompactFlash card is only $140 . And the CompactFlash interface is electrically identical to IDE/PATA, so you can use a $5 mechanical adapter 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)
    • 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 :)
    --
    My bicyles
    1. Re:Why are flash hard drives so expensive??? by danbert8 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
    2. Re:Why are flash hard drives so expensive??? by llZENll · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.