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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 Asus was designed to be small and cheap while the Sony was designed to be expensive and powerful. The hardware is quite a bit different: 1.2ghz dual core vs 675mhz single core, 4GB SSD vs 32GB SSD, different screen sizes.
I don't see it as a bad thing because more products = more options = better for consumers. Also more products using SSD = higher SSD demand = more SSD R&D = cheaper and/or better SSDs. If all major PC manufacturers have legitimate products for sale with SSDs, then within a year or two SSD should really start putting pressure on hard drives and become even more affordable.
So I say good for Sony. I won't buy their laptop but if it gets another SSD manufacturer some cash flow then it only means more potential for SSD growth in the future.
Flash has a longer expected life than most hard-drives these days, for all but the most deliberately contrived use cases, so it can't be that.
You've got a great point. Toshiba wouldn't ever push restrictive DRM on consumers, own an RIAA member company, or pay a major studio to adopt their technology after it couldn't gain adoption on its own merits. They've actually got a squeaky-clean corporate reputation. Hugely ethical...
Is that supposed to worry me?
Does anyone actually have any stats to compare flash write limitatons to conventional hard disks? It's not hard to find numbers for flash, but I have trouble finding the numbers for conventional hard disks.
Normal hard disks don't do sector remapping, so your first failure will occur whenever you put too much abuse on a single sector (or when there's a mechanical failure). Modern flash drives have a few million writes per sector before failure, which is reportedly notably less than on a convenctional hard disk. However, flash disks have a clever process in which they track how many writes have been made to each sector; the closer a sector gets to a limit, the less frequently modified data gets put there (it'll move data around as necessary to achieve this). In short, you have to essentially make a few million writes to *every sector on the disk* before you get any failures. Let's repeat StorageSearch's calculation:
Write endurance: 2 million cycles
Sustained write speed: 80MB/sec
Capacity: 64GB
2,000,000*64,000,000,000/80,000,000 = 1,600,000,000 seconds = 51 years.
Is this really a problem? 51 years of continuous writes? Now, there are some nuances to the real situation (there's some write overhead on the disk itself, but then again, you'd need to be doing sequential writes with huge sectors to get that kind of performance), but you get the picture.
Here's the specs for an Mtron 32G SSD, which reports "greater than 85 years assuming 100G / day erase/write cycles" (overwriting the whole disk 3 times a day).
Dear Lord: One of your creatures may be hurt tonight. Please let it be the other creature.
Space is a huge issue with SSD based laptops. This isn't the first Flash laptop from Sony--my UX390N is all flash and almost a year old. I had to take the stupid restoration partition off the flash drive in order to have enough space to install Microsoft Office.
An 8GB restore partition on a 32GB SSD (that costed $600 at the time) means that Sony is using $200 of your money to avoid shipping $1 worth of DVD restoration media. Especially when you consider that the vast majority of that 8GB is all the crapware Sony pre-installs--none of it useful.
aka Matthew at SlashNOT/!
http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/swu-list.pl?mdl=VGNTZ190NB&LOC=3
YES, I was actually surprised.
Now get bartPE to pair down XP, with openoffice, and firefox to under 1GB, you'll have 31 GB left for data.
I don't know, 4kg is pretty heavy to lug around all day.
My wife went and bought an EeePC while I was out of town. I was mad at first because she didn't consult me, but when I saw the thing I got all moist. It's really a sweet little machine and perfect for her.
I don't know why this Sony $3000 laptop would be preferable to the little Asus machine. I don't care to read TFA, because I know I wouldn't buy anything from Sony anyway, so actually, the idea that they've got a SSD based laptop for $3k and my wife just bought an SSD laptop for less than $500 from a company I actually likemakes me feel pretty smug.
Since the EeePC has an SD drive, I don't really worry too much about the small storage. As long as it does what it does, I'm happy. More important, my wife is happy. Any of you who are married will understand.
You are welcome on my lawn.