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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!"
Anyone know how long do these flash drives last?
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Wouldn't it be more appropriate to call them "flimsy state" devices, rather than "solid state"?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Dear god that looks amazing.
The cylindrical battery in the hinge is inspired.
Maybe I should get out more.
liqbase
Will it run linux?
The game.
It's good we're finally starting to see SSDs starting to ship as an option in notebooks. Mechanical hard drives have served us well but I for one can't wait for the speed and reliability increases we're going to see in the future with Solid State.
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!
Either this is a very cheap, or a very light laptop.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
The price is £1,786.38 or (£2,099.00 as reviewed).
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Glancing through the description, I saw the prices quoted, and thought "heck....that's not too bad...".
:(
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.)
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Sure, it's not exactly worth it yet unless you've got the money anyway or specifically require a small, lightweight machine with a Solid State drive, however this is still good news regardless.
This is progress and it means the cheaper SSD notebooks are just around the corner once this technology becomes mainstream.
Someday I will be trusted to tag stories on my own... Until then, where the 'slashvertisement' tag for this story?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
So it would be more like $2000 on your side of the pond.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
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.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Seems like everyone has forgotten about Sony and it's affinity for screwing over it's customers with proprietary hardware, poor support, and malware. Am I the only one who refuses to buy anything made by Sony, including entertainment devices, computers, music and movies?
Eternity is a time bomb.
As for light and cheap laptop i have to point out the Asus EEEhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Eee. 2lb, 7inch LCD, 900 MHz Pentium M , 512 MB DDR2-400, 4 or 8 GB flash Solid state drive, Starting at $200, perfect for portable needs
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.
I think he gave up and used an old Thinkpad he had lying around.
The cake is a pie
Sony's MSRP on the website is 3199, no extended warranty, etc. I was more impressed by the carbon fiber body than the SSD, can always just buy the SSD and throw it in any laptop. Now all i need to do is find a way to get a contract job with that plus wages as my fee.
An I.T. motto in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing...
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.
The Raven
This looks like a cool machine. I wish I could get a more reasonable priced one though. I'd kill for a dayplanner sized laptop, but $4000 us is too much. I don't even care if it doesn't have an integrated cd/dvd drive, but a tiny comp would be great for email/reference/basic web browsing for internet searches. Kind of like a pda on superstrength steroids. I don't need a tiny laptop for truly intense application like gaming or compiling a kernel. The solid state drive would only sweeten the deal. Alas, tiny laptops are always too expensive.
This is a tech site. Techies are interested in new technology. New technology is sold, not given away. Is Slashdot simply not supposed to mention any new technology? What is the difference between a "Slashvertisement" and an interesting story about new technology?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Uhh... my sources tell me that a laptop with projecting front buttons is asking for them to break. EVidently, the most common injury to a laptop is a hard landing. Since we tend to carry them with a thin side pointing down, they land there. And buttons break.
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 (fresh) battery?
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.
TFA mentioned specific models / features sony put out before mac, stating most people / fanboys would think it was a copy.
An I.T. motto in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing...
Will it blend?
The real question is: does it play .ogg?
--
By which I mean Vorbis, FLAC, Theora, and any other Ogg and non-ogg non-DRM free formats.
Rootkit pre-installed for your convenience.
-q
Swap means that stuff that genuinely is NEVER used can be swapped out and forgotten about. That means more space for a disk cache or a write buffer, which, in turn, means fewer writes to the disk.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
fair enough - I only looked at the pictures in a bit of a hurry. I'm a typical /. poster yada blah. Apple have started with LED backlighting too though (3 months ago?) and any lapper could be retrofitted with, say, the Samsung 32Gb SSD that's available now with the 64Gb following later on in the year. I do think, purely aesthetically, the lines of the Sony aren't as good but of course it's about more than design principles.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
Give it a rest, fatso.
Oh FFS! I wasn't trolling just putting forward my impression of the design unsupported by reading the article. I hate the -1 modding that goes on here sometimes.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
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???
Inquiring minds want to know. Maybe I can start selling cheapo 16gb solid state drives on eBay for $180 and make a killing
My bicyles
It'll be a cold day in hell before I hand my money to Sony.
http://linux-wless.passys.nl/ That site is awesome. Thanks for the link! I've been hoping for a searchable database of linux-friendly wireless cards for a while (even thought about making my own)!
My bicyles
Well, if you put forth an incorrect opinion because you didn't educate yourself prior to posting, why shouldn't you deserve a -1 mod?
Is flaccid state better?
Ask MicroSoft for assurance and immoral support or consult with Dr. Stallman for a cure.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
From TFA:
Your ad here. Ask me how!
They're totally screwing you every chance they get.
;)
I was more putting the question out there into the blue nowhere rather than disagreeing with your comment.
Eternity is a time bomb.
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.
$200 laptops are here. It's small, light and has more horsepower than the five year old PIII I'm using. With GNU/Linux, you don't need a portable super computer.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
bwahahahahaha
but, really, good point.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Well, if that's the case then 90% of posts should be modded -1 troll. After all /. is infamous for people not RTFA'ing.
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?
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
Amen!
According to TFA you spend that much for a solid state drive and save a whoooooping 0.04 KG in weight compared to a traditional hard drive - and you get much much smaller storage capacity. The weight difference is less then a feather!!!!!
Unless the solid state drive increase the battery life significantly, I see no sense at all in buying this kind of machines...
Though slightly off topic, this article prompts me to ask the following question:
With solid state disks (SSD) becoming ever more abundant, is there any utility to optimize file systems for the new hardware? By this I am driving at the point that many file systems presume they are witting with a traditional hard disk. They assume things like tracks, cylinders, and heads are down there somewhere. These assumptions are present in the structuring and subsequent optimization of the file system's source code.
Do current SSDs use the cylinders & heads metaphor in their hardware controller? Do they implement something new?
Presumably, people are all over this issue (or possibly not, this may be a non-issue). Who are these people, and where do I read about their work?
Before we get all gooey over Sony's new kit, let's not forget Sony's rootkit on audio CDs. What's actually worse than the rootkit itself is that Sony did not agree in the settlement they would not do it again. Then they buy legislation exempting themselves from lawsuits when they do do it again.
Sony is on my vendor blacklist for a long, long time because of this.
Even with the current very weak dollar, 2.4 pounds sounds like a lot less than 100 dollars.
I *am* an Apple fan, but I must say, the vaio really looks great. I just bet it would look even better running OS X :)
It's a shame though they always put those windows and Intel stickers near the keyboard; that really does not improve the looks at all.
Maybe they should try to remove those; that it runs Vista is obvious, and Intel could probably think up a small, classy sticker for those high-end notebooks. If at all necessary.
Never one thin dime to Sony from me or anybody I'm advising on electronic or computer purchases.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
This US version (sonystyle.com) looks awfully similar for $3300
I am a little biased agaisnt Sony products.
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 card reader only supports memory stick ram for digital cameras and nothing else. Not too bad since we have sony camera (that is subject to recall because its defective) but we can't upgrade to anything but a sony camera because the notebook reads nothing else.
I will pass on this one and would prefer the samsung one the author mentioned if I had money to burn. Or better yet wait until Linevo comes out with a newer thinkpad that supports that comes with ssd.
http://saveie6.com/
Not that it probably matters that much but if it weighs 1.15kg, it also weighs 2.54lbs, not 2.4 (at least on the planet earth).
I'm with you, I like a computer with curves and jiggly bits.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Please don't use "umm" or "err" or "erm".
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
Why is it so hot? Where am I going? What am I doing in this handbasket?
I've got a Dell X1 weighing in on 1140 grams according to the specs... battery time is not something that is recommended but then I don't use it much outdoors anyways.
60 gig of (normal) hdd and 1280megs of ram for the small fee of about $3k almost 2 years ago... and it runs Gentoo and hasn't failed once... yet that is
Vegetarians eat Vegetables, Humanitarians frighten me...
I think 90% of the posts on here should be modded "-1 Jackass" these days but that's another topic...
I misinterpreted your post. I thought you had been trying to imply that Sony was attempting to mimic the Apple design with the Vaio TZ series. Having had a TX (same design as the TZ) for almost a year before Apple launched their smaller Macbooks, it would have been impossible for Sony to be copying the Mac style.
Erm... Are you sure the problem is not with the "good input" bit?
-
if my product made a real interesting story on its own I assure you I (at least) wouldn't go and
... um ... interesting
spend +$ on slashvertisments. Would not the techie community you speak of be eager to talk about it already?
so the obvious answer you knew:
"a slashvertissement" is paid for, not always interesting
"a real interesting story" - is
good of you to say so. I didn't quite express myself properly on the first post and didn't mean to imply anyone was copying anyone. I do think that Sony's machine isn't quite as sleek as the Mac portables - I particularly think the hinge looks a little awkard (in design terms compared to how Apple hide theirs) - and it interests me as a design problem. However very difficult to talk about these things on here, I rushed the post and certain hair trigger mods did the rest.
Cheers - E
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
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 out of sheer curiosity. Not discussing it is not simply an oversight, it's just plain strange.
Just some ball-park figures based on different types of use. (Doing nothing but word-processing for X straight hours. V.S. heavy graphics work. How many DVD's can you read/burn on a charge.)
This stuff matters, and it absolutely affects which machine I will buy. Is there some kind of moratorium on battery life comparisons in the portable computer review world, or is the reviewer just being thoughtless?
-FL
sys 64738
Instead of an optical drive spindle.
And I'd like the cost/GB to be in the same ballpark as CD-R or DVD-R media.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Were we reading the same review?
No matter how good it is, I won't give any money to those wankers.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
Is there a company that's offering a model with both a solid state drive (for the OS and office apps), as well as a regular HDD (for data)? Sort of the best of both worlds in terms of fast access for most tasks, and enough room to store music (and pron:). Most brands have models that allow for two hard drives, but I haven't found one with one of each.
Sorry, I couldn't find a good enough search phrase to see if this topic has been mentioned in this thread...
Obviously, this Sony laptop is built for weight benefits too, but what if that's not as important? I'm more interested in the speed advantages and battery consumption, but don't want to lug around an external drive.
Yes, and I clearly skimmed past the line while searching for the section devoted to battery life. He devoted a couple hundred words to the keyboard and to things like carbon fibers, but burried the highly subjecive and thus virtually useless battery life comment in the middle of a paragraph amongst a bunch of other left-over details on the last page of the review. Granted I was too tired to be reading last night with full awareness, but that doesn't change the general thrust of my comment.
The only comment I do remember seeing was the one relating to the screen using LED lighting improving battery life, which the author even said, "is another majorly important factor". Yes it is! I would like to see comparison tests, not half-baked one-liners and lame excuses about not having some battery testing software installed. How about running the machine for a couple of days under different conditions?
Like I said, there was a time when reviewers made the effort to include this information. But maybe I'm different. I actually spend a lot of time away from home-base with a portable, so battery life really counts. Maybe other people don't press their machines the way I do. We don't even know from the review what kind of battery technology the machine uses, or what kind of power adaptor it employs, or anything remotely practical with regard to its power system. He told us it had a green light and that it's cylindrical in shape. Gee thanks. A six-year old could have given me that information.
-FL
I remember reading something recently about why some CF cards show up as removable media and others show up as hard drives. It boils down to a firmware option on the card that tells the computer what type of device it is. So some cards do not show up as removable devices. You'd probably have better luck with some of the newer UDMA cards like the Sandisk Extreme IV, Kinston Ultimate 266x, or Lexar 300x ranges. I'm not sure about any of the slower cards but I'm sure all of these are UDMA, and are much more likely to have their firmware set to declare themselves as non-removable storage devices.