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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.'"
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?
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.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
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.
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).
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
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.
I think the main reason why laptops "grow" is the fact that a lot of people use them as a replacement for a desktop PC. They don't care about its size and they do care about its performance.
And about the WalMart thingie that's bigger than need be: well, packing the hardware tight together isn't exactly easy or cheap + it's harder to cool those cramped spaces. That might be a reason. But that's just a gues..
I'm an infovore...
Can it run Linux?
I'm serious about this.
Right. (Database) servers. That probably have a lot of I/O operations and frequently write to disks. You know about limitations of flash memory don't you?
That's also one of the major reasons that I won't buy any of this hardware anytime soon. I need to be able to write a lot to my disk without bricking it in turn...
I'm an infovore...
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.
It comes with Windows Vista Business. Vista requires 40GB of hard drive space if you intend to use it to run applications. (Otherwise it's stuck only being suitable for "booting the Operating System, without running applications or games" - really!)
If you were to blow away Vista and replace it with XP or Linux, then 32GB would be fine for general office work. But since it comes with Vista, you apparently won't be able to actually use it.
Which, having tried Vista out, is sadly quite likely to be true. I just checked, and C:\WINDOWS takes up 13GB of space just for the system. Keep in mind that Windows also spreads files out in C:\Program Files which I'm NOT counting, since I can't separate out the applications I've installed and what it's installed.
And before anyone asks, no, I'm not accidentally counting the page file. That's in C:\pagefile.sys. And Vista also has a SEPARATE hibernation file it creates, which will require another 2GB for this laptop.
So, yes, for Vista, 32GB is quite small, to the point of almost being unusable - according to Microsoft themselves, who list the minimum space requirement as 40GB for Vista Business.
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.
It'll be interesting to see if people start using it with the Web2.0/Google office apps sort of idea, where most of what you do is in a web browser, with your documents stored on their servers. Makes it a handy small business laptop in that case, can take it wherever cos it's light and presumably durable, has enough space to store your basic odds and ends, and assuming you can get a network connection, all your stuff is on the interwebs somewhere.
Never look back at the carnage.
I agree. I have an external 160GB drive I carry with me which houses all my media, backups, and other files. It is very small and fits in my pocket just fine. I also have a large size USB thumbdrive with my critical files. You can get 32GB thumbdrives now for around $300US.
I run around 50 commodity PC's as pseudo servers for mundane tasks such as driving neon signs. Cases where a high end server doesn't make sense. These things will run for 4 or 5 years then have a PSU or hard drive fail. One's that run DOS are on Disk-On-Chip technology, but that is expensive for Windows builds. I imagine these solid state drives can eliminate the drive failure issue.
So as a geek, I'd love to see these in many of my pseudo servers. I don't need more than about 5GB for Windows and the application.
I'd also like to see this in my PC as my boot drive. I can handle restoring from backup my data drive. Getting the OS restored is always a half day endeavor. Where is my Acronis/Ghost boot disk anyway?