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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.'"
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 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 think for geeks (and most other people, too), it'll mostly mean that it can't be your main system. If anything, geeks should be able to deal with the idea of syncing to remote servers, working in remote sessions, and things like that more easily than most people.
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.
Real geeks use whatever they want. Geeks with no self esteem try to make cliques.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ahhhhhhhahhhhhh!
He'll save every one of us!
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.
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 believe that would be Microsoft.