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!"

Comments

Flash Drives

[Eightyford]

Anyone know how long do these flash drives last?

Re:Flash Drives

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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. 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.

but

[thatskinnyguy]

Will it run linux?

£ or lb?

[Eudial]

Either this is a very cheap, or a very light laptop.

Re:$4000?

[Nimsoft]

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.

Re: wireless issues

[andrewd18]

The two greatest resources I've found for finding Linux wireless card drivers are:

http://linux-wless.passys.nl/
http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/joomla/index.ph p?/component/option,com_openwiki/Itemid,33/id,list /

Between those two, I've never had a problem finding drivers. Maybe you could point your friend in that direction.

Why are flash hard drives so expensive???

[MoxFulder]

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 :)

Re:Why are flash hard drives so expensive???

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

A Few Days or Essentially Forever

[arrianus]

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.