Sony Vaio Z i5/i7 Official Owners Thread

Someone is talking about me?

I was quoting from a post in Taiwan's forum, the user complained that there is no wear-leveling, I know the differences between trim and wear-leveling, but I was just quoting.

 

All the photo's I've seen of the drive sandwiches have been frustratingly photoshoped to blur the NAND ID.

We could close this question with a good photo.

Didn't the Z790 have a embedded RAID0 SSD? I think some of those drives showed the MMCRE28G name as well.

I also know the differences, just got frustrated with this darn thread and posted before thinking. Once again, my apologies.

 

Someone in Taiwan dissected his new Z with pictures and how to replace Gobi2000 with the unlocked one.

The picture quality is very good, you can see all the innards..

Check by yourself...

http://www.mobile01.com/topicdetail.php?f=258&t=1457882&last=18024497

 

Hi Guys,

Been reading this forum for a while before I bought the Z115 in Shanghai. Since I just got it two days ago, thought I would share my 2 cents with you regarding my user experience.

One question I see people asked a lot before was the difference between the full HD screen and the 1600 one. Well according to the sony support in China, those two screens are the same except resolution (one is not higher grade than the other or anything like that). I tend to believe that because if you want CTO one in China with the full HD screen, it only costs you 300RMB or 44USD more, which is peanuts.

From my own usage, perhaps due to never had a 13.3inch screen before, I find even 1600 resolution too small for me, so I increased font size. It does leads to certain inconveniences like when I try to run the Sony recovery utility, I couldn't see the yes/no confirmation buttons. So it's a bit of a pain, can't imagine what the full HD would be like.

So far only been doing web browsing and windows updating installing office and patches, left it on all night. Fan noise is very quiet, I hardly notice it. And temp is very cool all around with only left side where the vent is gets warm.

Anyway, loving the machine so far. Only thing I would complain is too much bloat ware, clean install seems to be such hard work, really don't feel like doing it. Since the Z115 doesn't have a DVD drive, so making a recovery disk is a pain also; does anyone know if it's possible to make one without a CD, like on a memory stick or USB key or something?

 

Buddy of mine had a mmcre28g series ssd in his HP notebook too - it showed up as mmcre28g in the bios, but i included a pic of it too. (it was also 1.8 size) He's selling it now to upgrade to a 256gb version. Anyway, the data sheet via samsung is located here:
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/productInfo.do?fmly_id=161&partnum=MMCRE28G8MXP

Firmware version on it was VBM1AH1Q as shown in the pic

 

They are so sure about wear leveling -- there is no wear leveling...but I doubt it.

Please use google translate to read the following thread

http://www.mobile01.com/topicdetail.php?f=258&t=1455013&last=18023352

 

Sony will charge a premium for their product but it is a such cheapskate when it comes with providing the basics like Recovery Disk, in particular on the model Z115 which does not have an internal optical drive. So does Sony expect Z115 buyers to go out and buy an external drive when it should have been part of the package? Such a premium product my a**!

Furthermore, Sony forces 3/4 of the world to accept the z115 with only one color (silver) and z116/117 with black only. Ok..enough rants!

 

funnily enough that's exactly what the support person said...they expect me to hook up to an external drive and DIY one (they can't provide one even if I offered to buy one)...if anyone here have recovery disk image for me to download i would be most thankful...

 

They just keep saying it, I don't see anyone providing proof. How can they be so sure?

EDIT: reading that thread more carefully, it's just one person who keeps saying there's no wear leveling. Other people are questioning that person but he has yet to supply proof. So I would take this c-u-m grano salis.

EDIT2: WTH, can't write c-u-m?

 

I'm curious how you would even know without someone from Samsung saying so. Isn't that a completely internal procedure normally performed fully automatically? What did they do, perform 10,000 overwrites to the same file?

 

I was looking through the Engineering Windows blog that psyang had posted earlier: http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

Interestingly, they had this to say about pagefile on ssd:

ooooh! topsies!

 

Hi, Im planning to purchase the high end model of Vaio Z. 117GG.

I have some questions..
-Is the FULL HD screen technology made up of RGB LED? How is it compared with DELL RGB LED?
-Based on the SSD discussion int his thread, is there a problem with the new vaio z SSD?
-Is there any frustrating problem or disappointment with this vaio z?
-Is it good for mutitasking as well as 10 hours of usage a day?
-Can it handle mutiple files processing? for example, i'll be editing, adding, deleting and creating many files/custom made videos. Lets say about 50-100 documents, mini clips for a day for presentation, monthly about 2500 Documents/Clips/Images (sizing around 5kb to 500MB). Will it reduce the lifespan of the SSD? If yes, what would be the lifespan?
-What about the wifi, is it Wireless N 3x3 6200?

These are the golden questions in my head, please help me to solve it

 

Anyone know if the new Zs are in store yet?

 

NO, it's just basic edge lit white led, don't know how well it compares to the Dell.

Once again, nobody knows because only 2 or 3 people who visits this thread have the laptop.

Yes, it should be excellent in multitasking. And when you say 10 hours of usage, don't know if you mean plugged to the wall or on battery. If plugged into the wall, I don't see any problem. Any notebook today can handle being used continuously for hours on end, some are never turned off even. If you're referring to battery life however, I think the Z will disappoint.

I'm no expert in SSD. But let's do some math: The drive you're looking at probably has 256GB, let's take 56 GB for static data like programs and OS and etc. Therefore you have 200 GB of free space to write on times that by 10000 writes and you have to write approximately 2 pentabyte of data to kill the drive. Divide that by 5 if you intend to use the laptop for 5 years and 365 days in a year. You would have to write approximately 1 TB per day to kill the drive within 5 years (of course, this assumes nothing else happens to the drive and everything performs to specification).

Yes and no, because it is Intel Wireless N 2x2 6200. Though in Japan you can get it CTO to the 3x3 6300.

 

I can only answer this one, so far with 2 days of usage, nothing of note yet...

 

Whats the configuration of your Z? What kinda battery life are you seeing?

 

Mine is a Z115, i5-520M CPU, 4G RAM, 500G Hard disk, 1600 screen. Basically the cheapest ready made model.

Battery life wise haven't really paid too much attention, seems like around 3-4 hours. Someone told me before that with a new battery you need a few complete charge/dis-charge cycles to get to its max capacity, so I think there is room for improvement here.

 

The PCPro review showed the full model number of the SSD drive: MMCRE28GQDXP-MVB

Google doesn't bring anything interesting up, though.

-Peter

 

1. The screen is not RGB LED, but it's at least as good. I used to own an RGBLED M4400, and got rid of it quickly after I found how uncomfortable it was to use for extended periods of time (extrermely hot, sharp edges, poor touchpad AND poor trackpoint, glossy screen, etc.).
2. Can't answer this, since I purchased the HDD model (and swapped with the Intel X25-M SSD). My previous Z (which will be up for sale soon) that I used for 6+ months heavily has no issues with the RAID 0 SSD.
3. Nothing major. The battery slightly wiggles as with most VAIOs, the fan can get a bit loud when it's being pushed. Aside from that, I can't think of anything that has bothered me in the 6 days that I've used it. More people should be able to enlighten us with their impressions and annoyances over the next couple weeks, though.
4. On AC power? The Z has a quality build and has quality components. It's built for "power users". As for battery, you would need to purchase the L battery. That in combination with the included S battery should give you an easy 10 hours, unless you push it hard on SPEED mode. I get roughly 5 hours on light usage (STAMINA mode) with the S battery when the frame rate is set to 40Hz. The L battery is on the way, but you can expect 50% longer battery life if you use it.
5. No problems at all. Someone else will have to answer about the RAIDed SSD configuration.
6. For whatever reason, the Centrino 6300 triple-stream module is only available in Japan as an option (assuming you don't also order WiMax, in which case, you'll receive the 6250). I ordered the 6300 option because there is a noticeable difference in range and speeds (a result of the better range) with the triple-antenna option.

 

Are these calculations based on an SSD without TRIM Support. If so, I can handle this Z's degradation for 5yrs. The question is how slow the Stalls will be?

 

also can anyone tell me when you guys talk about degradation of the ssd drives...once it occurs will the ssd drive be as slow as say a normal hdd? or would it be worst?

also, would a complete recovery of the ssd to factory state cure this problem with degradation?

so basically if this degradation cannot be fixed the ssd will die eventually over time?? and i guess that would mean costly replacement of the drives say 5 years down the line?

 

Reads will not degrade - they will remain the same speed.

But writes will slow down. Anecdotally, some have reported (with other SSD drives) stalls of 10seconds or more for writes.

Can the drive's write speed be restored? Likely, but not tested:

In theory, making an image of the drive, then doing a full erase of the drive, and putting the image back on the drive will restore the drive to full speed again without requiring a reinstall. Possible issue is the uncertainty of the imaging software (eg. Acronis) of having the right raid drivers to see the raid array when restoring the image.

Another possible method is the so-called "Tony-Trim" method posted a few pages back where 3rd party software is used to consolidate all the free space on the drive, then effectively erase the free space bytes. This method doesn't require a full erase of the drive, so it's "safer". This method tries to imitate the TRIM command over the drive using software. This has not been tested/confirmed to work on the Z's RAID array.

-Peter

 

I don't know much about SSD, but if it's 5yr degradation we are talking about here then i don't know what's the fuss is all about...

I don't think I have ever used a notebook or desktop PC for more than 5 yrs. I'm also guessing that in 1-2 yrs time you can probably change to a new generation of super fast, efficient SSD for probably half of the price today...

 

He wasn't talking about degraded performance after 5 years... he was talking about complete destruction of the drive after 5 years or so (remember, this is all theoretical, YMMV). The performance will be degraded much much sooner - as soon as you've written once to every sector of the SSD.

 

Well, it's not like the odometer rolls over a number and suddenly the drive is completely shot. There's also a certain amount of "slack" space on the drive for re-mapping of bad cells.

Might be worth getting the extended warranty?

 

I agree. I have heavily used the 256gig SSD in my last Z for 1.5 years with no problems and it will very soon be my backup. If my previous top of the line carbon cased SZ (its so pretty!) is good for backup duty I might chance a re image of this previous Z to see if it changes the write speed to the SSD. It still has the factory supplied os on it, never rebuilt! Yes, heavy use, proper maintenance. I don't worry about the SSD at all. At this point it is still faster then any hd, read and write. It writes a 1 gig fle in seconds that take minutes to write on my brand new quad core 8gig desktop I bought for heavy duty photoshop duty processing bill board sized high rez files. My old Z beats it in all ways except not enough memory. My old Z is still on 3 gigs limited by 32bit vista. I have not been able to complete a few projects due to not enough memory, so time for an upgrade. The SSD was never a problem. Can't wait for the 512 and quad raid0. Way to go, Sony!

 

Sorry, if I got some of you guys confused between trim and the degradation of SSD drive.

The most pertinent question right now is TRIM. Writing to a SSD is like using plates for dinner. Every night you would use a plate for you dinner that is like writing to the SSD drive. After dinner, you would leave the plate in the sink and not wash it. Since there is only a finite number of plates in the cupboard, one day you have no plates to put your dinner on. This is analogous to when every sector of the SSD has been written to. So in order to have your dinner (ie. write to your SSD) you would first have to wash your dishes. So there is a lag time between issuing the write command and the write actually commiting to the drive.

The other issue I was talking about is completely different and a much less worrisome issue. SSDs are known to have a set number of writes before they die. Sort of like using a pen, after a while you run out of ink. Consumer SSDs are known to have only approimately 10000 writes. And as I was explaining earlier, even though the number looks small, it will still take a user writing more than a terabyte everyday to kill the a 200 GB drive within 5 years.

I hope I have cleared up the issues and alleviated some of your fear (or induced more XD).

 

We discussed this sometime before and your answer was insightful, but I still suspect that stalls happen mostly with SSDs that have no or inadequate spare space. With adequate spare space, after the drive is saturated, writes go to the spare space, and afterwards garbage collection happens to free up those blocks that could've been overwritten and put them back into the spare space.

When we discussed this before you mentioned that inadequate spare space could still cause stalls, and that's a good point but I remember reading that spare space on SSDs are rather large, on the order of several gigabytes or more, and should be adequate to handle everyday tasks after drive saturation.

The other problem you mentioned, how this kind of garbage collection will work with wear leveling algorithms, is more troubling. I remember now the anandtech article on SSD degradation in the days before TRIM. They found that most SSDs suffer from very slow write speeds after saturation, but the Intel SSDs are surprisingly resilient. I think the theory is that to achieve this kind of resilience after saturation requires a large spare region, and a trade off between the wear leveling, garbage collection, and write amplification algorithms. By using a less aggressive wear leveling algorithm and allowing for higher write amplification, garbage collection may be able to prevent degradation after saturation. This then becomes a tradeoff between degradation, longevity, and average write speed. I think that article shows that even without TRIM, GC alone may be able to prevent degradation in most cases, provided you get those algorithms right and make those tradeoffs.

The use of third party software to manually perform TRIM I think will not work on RAIDed SSDs. As I understand it, those programs read the file system table (I think only NTFS supported so far) to figure out which blocks have deleted blocks that can be overwritten or combined, but with RAID there is no longer a direct mapping from the file system table to the blocks and it becomes impossible to free up blocks this way.

 

Ordered my Z yesterday with 8gb ram, 256ssd,carbon fiber, windows 7 pro, fresh start, and a 3 year warranty, also got a 15% discount, final cost was $2,818.00. shipping date was set to 3/23, rep said there was a shortage of the carbon fiber. as for the discount all i did was, when they picked up the first thing i said was i am looking to buy a Z series and i heard there is a 15% discount if i spec the Z and add a 3 year warranty (the cheap one for $249). If the rep says they can only give you 10% or less hang up and call back. i think if the cost of the Z is above $3000 before tax they will give you 15% off.

 

I don't consider myself an expert on SSDs, but I'll respond based on my current understanding.

First, it's not clear that the Samsung SSDs have GC. Older Samsung drives did, but it was based on NTFS, and assumed the SSD was not in RAID (it understood NTFS' file layout and could thus determine what space could be GC'd). If Samsung did have GC, it could only possibly work on rewrites (updates), and not on deletes. The SSD is not informed of files that are deleted without TRIM. On rewrites, if the SSD is smart enough, I agree that it could write the updated file to free space, and mark the location of the old file as deleted (and thus, to be collected). But this assumes the SSD is smart enough.

I guess, then, my definition of "saturation" is when all free space is written to once.

Again, this assumes the Samsung drives have GC, and that its GC performs in this manner. I doubt it, but who knows? My take is that public fear of SSDs is with their longevity, so SSD makers will want to inflate (not compromise) their MTBF/write cycles number as much as possible.

I agree that consolidation of free space would be tricky with SSDs because of wear-leveling. But erasing unused blocks should still be possible as the RAID controller will map NTFS blocks to corresponding stripes on the SSD, and the SSD controller will map those stripes to the corresponding cells in the SSD. As long as the erase is a real erase, and not just a write of 0s or 1s, which would hasten saturation.

In theory, TRIM through software should be possible. It's precisely because the drive doesn't understand the file system that TRIM is required. So, it should be possible to closely mimic TRIM by having software read the file system, and send appropriate commands to the drive. In theory.

-Peter

 

thank you for putting it such simple terms SSD just seems so complex...

anyhow I'm not worried since only had budget for a normal HD

 

Yeah, I was told the 23rd too - I ordered carbon fiber as well. It seems our laptops are in the second major shipment, since other people are supposedly going to get there's within the next week or so.

 

here's a great post on how to maintain your SSD's (even in RAID) .. http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/f...TURBO-owners-with-FW-1-5-you-do-not-need-this ..

 

Well, despite my reservations on buying at this time, I decided to call up Sony USA and see if they would give me 15% off of a $2600+ CTO with ESP. Nope. The best that the guy (who seemed neither altogether knowledgeable about the Z, nor happy about his job) offered me was 10% off. I may try again tomorrow a couple more times. Three strikes, and it might be a sign for me to wait. :-(

 

well, maybe you can ask for a bluetooth wireless mouse to be thrown in instead, that's what they are giving away here in china...good luck

 

Just had an update from Sony UK that my CTO order should be with me tomorrow or Monday at the latest.

 

Does the UK site work for you? I go in, click on my order number, and I always get a "whoops" and it redirects back to the main site.

 

I've had an update for my order as well

Your customised VAIO order is on its way to our logistics centre.

We expect your VAIO order to be shipped out to you on 12.03.2010. Please note that this is an estimated shipping
time. We will send you an update if this estimate changes.

As for the sony site it works better in compatabilty mode or IE6?

Mappy

 

Have someone tried to get TRIM to work on the quad-model when they removed the raid and having 2/4 seperate drives ?

 

is this just a guess mate? i can only buy in june, so a refresh would be of great interest.

 

@junshao

what did you pay in RMB? I'm in Xi'an now and considering buying in US and having a friend ship it over, or possibly going to HK to pick one up ... the HK site seems cheaper than the US one

 

I've ordered my Vaio Z with the Large battery but is it also possible to get the S battery. There seem to be no accessories on sonystyle atm

 

Um, no. Spare space only delays the inevitable for a very short time.
The problem is that without TRIM, the garbage collection doesn't and can't know which blocks it can safely delete. It can only free up a block when the drive is told to rewrite it -- else, there's no way for the drive to know that it can be reaped. This is as true for blocks allocated from spare space as it is for normal blocks.

Think of it like a train; one where you only pay to get on the train, and no-one knows how far each passenger will be going. That's how trains operated in the early days of the railroads.

When new people arrive on the train, the conductor has to seat them. To assist with that, he has a small list with checkmarks that tells him which seats are taken or not. He can't just spot an empty seat and place you there, because someone might be using the bathroom or dining cart, or just be strolling.
As more passengers arrive, at a certain point there won't be any more unassigned seats. Even if half the seats are empty, according to the conductor's table, they're all in use. Having a "secret" area in one cart with extra seats won't solve that problem, but just give a very short reprieve when the situation occurs.
The conductor is also expected to do some rearranging from time to time, to ensure that companions that arrive together can sit together. His assistant, Mr. GC, helps with that -- seeing that Mr. X sits all alone in a six-seat seating, he asks him whether he would please move over to the free seat in another group. But Mr. GC could not do that if he didn't know that that seat was unoccupied. And even if Mr. GC had his own "secret" compartment to shuffle people into, that too would become full.

So sooner or later, you have a situation where a family of four comes in, and can't be seated because there aren't any seats for them. Even though the train is obviously only half full. At that point, the conductor has to walk from one end of the train to the other, and take a call of passengers, before reallocating some of them to give room. (With old trains, when they actually DID this, it could take a long time.)

Yet, the conductor has found a way to avoid this. Because he has support for TRIM, as people leave the train, he erases the check mark. He can then place new passengers in those seats, or have Mr. GC place people there, without having to make a roll call.

Of course, the train companies quickly found out that they could avoid the problem by selling tickets that were good for a journey from A to B, and no longer, and overwork the conductor a bit more to compensate, in that he had to check tickets after every stop and throw out people who weren't allowed on the train anymore.
This won't work on an SSD, though -- the expectation is that the storage is permanent.

 

This site in HK

http://www.sonystyle.com.hk/ss/product/vaio/vpcz117gg_e.jsp

quoting HK$19.980 - USD$2,574.84 USD

same specs on the US site is USD2,799

am I missing something here? Curious to know the price on the mainland now ... junshao?

EDIT: the HK one has the full HD screen too! curiouser and curiouser ....

 

I don't see how this makes my idea not workable. Without TRIM, from the perspective of the SSD, when it is told to write something, it is always one of two cases: either it is told to write to a block that hasn't been written to before, or it is told to rewrite a block that has been written to before. In the second case, the SSD doesn't know and doesn't care whether it is being told to rewrite that block because it is really rewriting that block or if that block has been deleted from the file system sometime ago and it's now just writing something else there. The point is that after the SSD is saturated, whenever it is told to write something, the SSD always knows which block it can safely delete - just delete the block it was told to write to. The first thing it does is write on an unwritten block in the spare space the data it was told to write, combined with data in the other cells of the block it wants to delete. At this point it has completed the requested write operation, and whatever data that was on the block it was told to write to is also preserved, except the cells it was told to overwrite, which can be safely ignored. It has now used up a spare block, but also knows a block it can safely delete. GC can then free up that block at some point. Returning the amount of spare space back to normal. Why wouldn't this work?

To use your train metaphor, the problem becomes trivial when each passenger comes onboard with a ticket that has assigned seating.

 

This Z117 you mentioned here in HK is the best valued one by far, mainland doesn't have an equivalent model. The top one which sells for 29,999 RMB only has 256G more SSD than the HK one, but as you can see is so much more expensive.

The model Z115 I bought is 12999, I got an electronic discount coupon which gave me 5% off so it was 12349; then they aslo gave me a wireless mouse for free. The Z115 in HK is actually slightly more expensive, but it has a better CPU, i5 540, and win7 professional (mine is win7 home premium).

So if you can get one in HK, I would strongly recommend the HK Z117 model.

Hope this helps.

 

I've seen some other forums with this big button which you can click called "YOU SHOULD HAVE SEARCHED BEFORE ASKING THIS QUESTION". There is obviously a possibility some real innocent people get hit with that button for the wrong reasons. There will not be a perfect solution.



But I can assure you that I read the articles.
I've been getting hammered since the first post [Yeah, I started it] where I created the, in my opinion very real concern, warning about TRIM. All the -

• "You can easily restore performance from recovering an image" [Obviously doesn't understand saturation and TRIM]
• "SSDs do not need TRIM, it will still fly faster than HDDs" [Obviously doesn't understand TRIM either]
• "You do not need TRIM, there is a software which allows you to reset the SSD to peak performance" [This one's funny because it referenced the very site and author who told us that he wouldn't go near an SSD without TRIM, plus that tool requires the SSD to have TRIM]
• "You just need to wipe your array and reformat every few months" [As a working adult not in IT profession, I only do that once a year maximum. I no longer fiddle with machines consisting ten hard drives and dedicate the time to fix problems.]
• "Mass Hysteria" [I haven't been trying to dissuade anyone from buying one, I was just asking a very serious and real question based on decent guesses.]

 

Oscar,

I would be very surprised to find any flash out there without wear levelling. I thought this only happened in very early flash days?

I believe even my ancient TZ's 40 gig Samsung SSD has wear levelling or the machine would have died by now.

 

Thanks for the user opinion Jun Shao.

You should ask arth.
He reckons nobody needs built in DVD burners for laptops anymore.

 

You are very welcome, so you reckon getting the HD version is a safer choice then? i was very tempted by the ssd but was put off by the price, never thought about any of the other issues discussed here...frankly didn't understand either....well still don't really...LOL