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Sony's Flash-Based Notebook Reviewed
Lucas123 writes "Computerworld's Rich Ericson reviewed Sony's first all flash-based laptop, which carries a whopping $3,200 price tag. Ericson says the laptop runs incredibly fast, with an average data transfer rate of 33.6MB/sec and great battery life. But, the laptop is also limited to certain uses. While lending itself to travel, the small capacity of its hard drive doesn't make it a real competitor for a main PC workhorse. 'While there's a lot to like [about the VAIO TZ191N notebook], there's only very limited uses for which I'd recommend this system. The best features — its size and the flash drive — are also its biggest limitations.'"
The big early adopters for this are Sony, and shortly Apple. I'm betting a Macbook Pro comes out in January that is going to be startlingly similar to this in spec and price.
The big drawback is space, "6GB of that space is taken by a hidden partition (for system recovery) and still more is take by the operating system (Windows Vista Business)." So you are losing 14GB for the recovery, OS and a couple of apps; nearly half the space gone before you start saving things.
Might not be too much of an issue for people saving documents, presentations and so on. For geeks that small amount of space would be very restricting.
Yes, but does it run XP?
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But I love this idea, I really dislike the currenty "portables" with 17" screens, its just like, not at all actually portable, I mean, I'm really surprised that the laptop industry has gone towards bigger laptops, rather than smaller (but that must be what people want right). I really like the idea of an ultra fast PC which is nice and small to use on the go, and the hard drive is PLENTY as long as you have a good sync program on your main PC and sync regularly, and lets face it, someone spending $3200 on a laptop probably will. But of course, $3200 for a "fast" laptop isnt ever a good investment, because the current progression (and the progression for quite a long time) has been too fast to warrant spending that much on what will very quickly become obselete. The main point is, this is an early adopter machine- very nice, but wont be the best by any stretch of the imaginiation.
So a $3200.00 limited use PC. This should be called the Sony ID-10-T PC.
Just as an aside... don't forget that the incessant Apple tablet rumors appear to be coming to fruition soon.
Just in case you'd rather not have a pos for an operating system. :)
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Is it just me...or does an unbelievably fast drive that doesn't store very much data seem kindof pointless? If you are only storing really SMALL files (txt)...then a SUPER fast disk probably isn't your greatest concern.
I understand the power savings..which are awesome....but storing really small files really really quickly just doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
Now if this was a web server, or a database, or something like THAT...i would understand...
Especially with a giant price tag like that..
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32GB is really a lot of space, especially for business users. Today we don't think it's enough, because we've all loaded our computers up with games, music, and video. But for business users who only use the laptop for storing business documents, it should be more than enough space.
My (old) laptop has 30GB of HDD, and that was plenty of room for 10+ years of business documents, plus numerous programming environments and databases. It only became limiting when I put 13GB of music on it.
For business-oriented 'road warriors' who value speed and battery life over games and media, this is probably a good choice. Especially if they can get their company to fork over the big $$ for it.
That said, I'd wait a year until the price comes down significantly and the space doubles or triples.
I love how the articles talks as though 32 gigs is a minuscule amount of space. My current desktop setup involves a machine with 2 40gig drives, one running Windows XP and the other loaded with Zenwalk. The only times I have space issues are when I'm downloading lots of anime, but that's nothing a dvd burner can't remember, and the laptop comes with one.
I don't give money to Sony, however, so I'll be waiting for an Apple variant.
And the masses cried out, "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0!"
I have to wonder if there isn't more of a market for Flash disk systems in servers rather than laptops.
As flash drives get bigger, shouldn't they present an ideal storage for databases with their extremely fast random reads? The drives can be small, have low power consumption and price is less of an issue in the server market.
What's holding the take up of these drives in the server market? Is it just that they are untested? Is availability of large flash chips still a problem? Does flash still suffer from burnout after x writes and if so isn't that an issue for these laptops?
I'd consider one if it were built for shock resistance. Too many allegedly rugged laptops/tablets are still limited to screens which break or flimsy plastic construction which breaks structurally with normal use.
Flash drive sounds like just the ticket, though.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
What could POSSIBLY be worth that much more money that a more conventional machine couldn't handle at a fraction of the price? so you get a little extra battery time. Woopty freakin' doo.
It's not like it has some giamungus drive for video editing, or the Special Magic Powers of the MacOS. I don't get who they think they're selling to.
I'm willing to say "I don't get it", but seriously - I don't see a market for this thing. When it's $1200, I suppose, but not $3200.
Now, the Asus is another story...
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Sorry people, but I'll go for the EEE pc. It will be the first PC I'll buy in 7 years, I've been waiting for it all that time :) It delivers a small, lightweight, laptop with limited capabilities, but still all the features you'd like a computer to have. Also, it is DEAD CHEAP. I recently looked at a site selling subnotebooks from Japan, all where going for 1200 dollars or more. Why would anyone buy those? Normally these machines were limited to upper-management people, but finally any normal person can also buy them, with an EEE and they WILL!!! Sorry if I sound like a fanboy, but if sony would have sold a 300 PC with the specs of an EEE, I would have bought it from them. Knowing Sony, they would have screwed it up badly anyway, using some strange sony-only form-factor (memory stick?). Asus was just the first to come with the right mix, and I hope many will follow.
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Fire.
Flame.
Boom.
FLASH.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
I'd say this isn't really anything new. The drives have been available for months, and there are likely other vendors that have already done it. Really, what's new and exciting about this, other than it has the most expensive four-letter word in consumer electronics attached to it?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
A company called Addonics has a bootable Compact-Flash-to-2.5"-IDE adapter for sale here. The Dual-CF model is $21.99. The page shows the adapter populated with CF and installed in a laptop.
I have no connection to Addonics except as a soon-to-be customer.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
There has been a flash version of the Portage R500 out for several months now, with twice the capacity (64GB) of hard drive and even as the dollar turns into monopoly money it costs less. Personally I don't like the fact they took the DVD drive out of the flash version, but I am being a bit picky.
Of course, you could just go with the poorly built knockoff. It'll just cost more to repair in the long term.
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I know it is a laptop, but Wifi just isn't as fast as a gigabit/100baseT ethernet cable, even under the best of conditions, and with a bit of interference can be quite bad.
Maybe they are thinking that because of the small hard drive nobody will ever need to move data quickly?
And, no possibility to make the laptop into a wifi base-station (Yes, I have done this before).
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I just read: Flesh Based Laptop;) Wanna know how I misread Asus? Ha, thought so.
The thing that those laptops had that the Asus wont have is quality. By the time you've bought enough of those, you'd be far behind the $1200 models if you bought them used.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Bought one (new on ebay for $2800) to replace a Toshiba that cost me $900 in 2002, and it's great. It works for me because I don't play high end video games, and is very snappy and VERY light.
I do mainly writing, php programming, video/photo editing, web design, and of course email/web. You have no idea what a productivity boon it is to be able to take your laptop everywhere with you, whip it out when you want it without worrying about battery life, then just pop it onto a docking station at night to charge just like a cell phone.
Real geeks write their operating system entirely in floating-point math.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Your model would probably have just as much expense if they didnt cut so many corners, especially on quality.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
$3000 and Intel GMA 950 with VISTA bad choice.
Flash can accept a limited number of write cycles before it starts to fail. This is no big deal for thumb drives, but can start to be a limit for boot/swap drives.
The ext3-users list has had a number of postings about people using flash boot drives finding that they die after a being used for a while. I haven't tracked tha causes of the failures, but it's definitely something that I'd worry about (I expect that mounting the drive 'noatime' would probably help).
If I had a client who bought one of these things I would strongly suggest a stringent frequent backup policy.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Well I guess with a poorly configured Windows system where everything has to be locally installed and stored yes, 32G might be small. 32 might be too small to store a blue ton of stuff like every movie since 1940 or 30000 mp3's. In a full network enabled OS/setup where you can access and manipulate remote programs and data 32G is more than enough. What is needed is a look at networked data as apposed to pack ratted crap storage.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
Was I the only one who thought they meant that the laptop ran Macromedia/Adobe Flash as some sort of mini-OS? Does such a thing exist?
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You can in fact run most any notebook off a USB key. FaunOS is a Linux distro specifically designed to run off a USB. In fact, I am using it as I write this now. I am using an Acer Aspire 5630: it worked with FaunOS out of the box. There are others (e.g. Mandriva), but my experience with FaunOS has been the best, so far.
There are companies moving in this direction. For example check out:
http://www.fusionio.com/
Up to 640GB NAND flash. Supposedly 700 MB/s transfer rate.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
The biggest drawback to your solution is that you only get a small hard drive on each channel. If 32GB weren't big enough, the pictured 4GB/per channel is pretty pitiful too.
Oh, I'm not saying that it would be 100% equal to the Sony version, but I think you would have to agree that even 8GB of flash with a $22 adapter provides pretty darn good bang for the buck.
What are the technical limitations of buying a bunch of cheap 1-4GB flash drives (anyone else pick a bunch of those up for stocking-stuffers last weekend?) and basically soldering an array of flash memory?
How would you tie the interfaces together? Actually, let's back up: which interface would you use? Would you be attaching the flash memory to an IDE interface or would you be funneling the data (so to speak) through one of the original USB connectors?
From a hardware configuration standpoint, where would you put your newly-soldered creation?
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Well that's the second post you've made saying basically the same thing and putting down as yet unidentified products. You're the one sounding like a fanboy.
Just to pre-empt your response, I'm typing this on my Vaio. It's a nice laptop, I like Vaios they're slick and shiny, but it's not like they're made out of some magical high quality pixie dust. I had to return this one before the warrantee was up because of screen defects. I had to return it a second time because the screen they replaced it with was worse than the original one.
So just shush please. By all accounts the Asus EeePC is excellent. I have it on authority from a Mac fanboy.
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IT'S A TRAP!
It seams that a notebook using a conventional 200GB hard drive with a 16GB flash cache would be pretty much indistinquisable in terms of battery life and performance. Cost and software complexity can be further lowered by using flash with fast read speed but slow writes. The operating system and some applications can then be installed on the flash partition while user data can go on the regular hard drive.
It seems better to put up with an occasional disk access than not to have an option to store your stuff at all.
... just buy their CF SATA adapter and plop it in the HD bay in your laptop. Most recent laptops have one or fewer IDE ports anyway.
When Apple comes out with the same thing at an even greater cost :)
Seriously though, this could be the beginning of flash based storage hitting the mainstream in laptops. The capacity is small right now (though how many people really *need* 300GB? Oh right... pr0n...) but I'm sure if it becomes popular, progress will follow at a decent pace.
This is awesome.. a bit pricey BUT awesome.. this hardware is going to change processing power in the next year.. watch you will start seeing the computer processing capability quad-droopling in the next YEAR.. see this flash technology is a completely whole new design in processors.. no more switches in the processors.. now it will be just currents.. electrical currents that is. which the new Playstation 3 processor uses the flash cell design.. it allows twice as much preformance with a smaller size.. VERY expensive right now.. but coming later it will be cheap and trended into the economy... SONY is doing great in pushing cpu technology.. a flash/Cell processor uses ZERO switches.. in pushes data in a current.. like a flash drive.. it holds a variation of frequency and current.. and the out put.. is preformance.. 5 times better then any switch/regular processor today.. the sony Playstation 3 already uses this..
32 GB is only small if you use Vista.
In a more serious note, I don't see why the hell a 32GB drive would imply small files. I would immediately install one game (about 5 GB) and one VM with Oracle for developing stuff (16 GB). Both using huge files.
And compiling C++ stuff would fly in that thing. That would eat another 2 GB. Still plenty of space IMO.
I don't understand why you have to store in your laptop every single mp3 or movie or installer you got.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Hmm, I misread the subject as "Sony's Flesh Based Notebook". Wouldn't it be even better as "Sony's Flesh Based Laptop"? How would that be under the Xmas tree this season....
Parent url is shock site redirect.
The url is another obscured shock site redirect.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Of course... small sized SSD HDD is essential for today's corporate users... as most of them are addicted to watching p0rn at work rather doing their job. nice!
All that money for a laptop that does not have a Ethernet jack??? I am all for saving space but that is silly. I can't tell you how many times I have rolled into an office only to be told wireless is forbidden because of confidentiality, sensitivity, concrete, security, etc. I need access to the data not the Internet. I need to do searches in the database with the tiff's optically connected to the CoLo site. Who in their right mind would leave that open on a simple WPA or WEP access point for any Jack or Jill who wanted to play 133t hax0r?? Also setting up would be a nightmare. It would take downloading a program (VPN) configuring all the settings, etc. etc. With cable just plug in. In fact, the only time I ever use the wireless is at the hotel. I fail to understand how the "road warrior's dream" laptop requires another piece just to get Ethernet to work. Are we reverting back to the dongle?? Oh how we all loved those times!
I actually don't, and is one of the reasons I try to stay away from Sony laptops and subnotebooks. The Sony keyboard (of the Fn-PgUp variety) is actually a big disadvantage for the way I use the machines.
While using Fn on an office desk may not seem too hard, it becomes very difficult when you use your laptop or subnotebook in unorthodox situations, eg while you walk using one hand to keep the laptop and the other to type, etc.
Personally I believe the best keyboard is IBM's classic ThinkPad keyboard.
Has anyone ported Stacker to flash drives yet?
already 185 comments and no one wants to see how slim/smexy it is?
Companies like Texas Memory Systems (no financial interest here!) have been producing large RAM disks for many years. One wonders why noone has worked with them to produce, say, 256GB drives. Sure, the form factor for a 1u unit is large, but the internals, if you take out the circuitry for the battery backup, doesn't take up all that much room that a good engineering team couldn't shrink it.
That just seems like a lot to pay for a buggy animation of a laptop.
I don't need a CD/DVD in my laptop; if I did want to use one, I have a USB DVD writer that I'd use. So I'd get rid of that and add some more battery.
I'd also be happy with a lot less of that expensive flash - 8GB would be fine for me, maybe even 4GB. Of course, this is possible because I'll run Linux on it [and I won't buy it until I can get it without preloaded Windows].
So you're all thinking, "buy an EEE then!". But the EEE doesn't have the nice screen that this has - and I'm happy to pay the premium for that.
There are hundreds of laptop computers out there, but they nearly all seem to be chasing after the same bit of market-share. Why does no-one want to make the machine that I want to buy?
Apparently the EeePC has an Atheros wifi chipset which can only be run using the hacky "ndiswrapper". There's a good FSDaily post detailing some of those issues including an apparent claim that if you replace the RAM then you void your warranty. Why Asus weren't smart enough to choose a wireless chipset with Free drivers boggles the mind. There's hope that a Free driver will appear "soon", but having been in the situation of playing with proprietary modules for hardware which I bought hoping that someone would reverse-engineer the driver sometime soon I'd rather not touch this. Ndiswrapper sucks if you're going to be keeping your machine reasonably current for security reasons. Too bad. I love the look of these things.