Slashdot Mirror
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?
This sig is alpha and shouldn't be viewed on production machines
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.
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...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
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
Fire.
Flame.
Boom.
FLASH.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
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 don't. I use Linux.
Yes, I know that is a fairly standard answer around here but that doesn't change the fact that it's true.
As for servers, you're right... flash seems poised to blow away expensive 15K RPM drives, whose access time is an order of magnitude slower(!) But that doesn't mean all other computers won't benefit, too.
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.
Thinkpads rock. They're all we use at work, and we have a 3 year replacement policy (our consultants get a new one every 3 years, when the warrenty runs out). The old ones come back for use in training sessions, and better than 90% of them are still in good shape after 3 years of use on the road. :)
I won't say they never break or have problems, but the support experience is good enough that I don't hear about it, either
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.
Ahhhhhhhahhhhhh!
He'll save every one of us!
Real geeks don't need on-off switches. They just use arrays of abacuses.
--
BMO
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.
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.
The url is another obscured shock site redirect.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.