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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
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!
Flimsy state? Not phallic enough. Solid state? Rock on.
Either this is a very cheap, or a very light laptop.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
Give it a rest, fatso.
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
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
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.
Even with the current very weak dollar, 2.4 pounds sounds like a lot less than 100 dollars.
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?