Sony Vaio Z i5/i7 Official Owners Thread

So what driver talks to the RAID controller..? Perhaps is a Sony-modified one that can send TRIM commands..?

Surely Sony must have provided a solution to this... I just can't believe they would throw a set of custom-built SSDs into their flagship laptop without having thought it through...

 

Can anyone confirm if the backlit keyboard can be turned on/off manually in windows or by switch instead of allowing for the sensor to determine when it comes on/off.

For example, let's say you are watching a movie and don't want the backlit keyboard on during the duration of the movie with the lots dim.

Thanks.

 

There needs to be an additional TRIM/RAID SSD Z thread to supplement this thread. SSD's are built around the Z and of course it will be discussed in here a lot be topical, it's unavoidable.
This thread here also seems to be also quite on topic.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=465962

On the subject of the Z, if i do get one it will likely be in July when i go on holiday. I would get one VAT free. Still, the only colour options would be black and i like the look of the metal shield one. Still, i'm undecided if i should go with a 13.1 with my TT or go for something bigger and just basically keep it at home on my desk. Down the line though i might want more mobility but then again i cold always sell the larger laptop.

 

I also have the base model Z115. So far I have found the fan noise to be on the mid to loud side, but not too annoying. I'm not sure what kind of buzzing noise you are hearing, for me it's just normal fan noise...maybe I'm just used to my desktop making far more noise than the Z.

 

Someone already posted a picture showing you the backlight settings in windows... browse the thread..

 

Thanks!

I saw the photo comparing the two before, but it's too small to be able to judge. The other two are good though.
I'm still not quite sure, but for now, I prefer the black one.

 

Zoinks posted an interesting screenshot of the two discs running in JBOD mode and seems to support TRIM.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/show...8&postcount=15

 

If it's any help, I had no trouble running the Intel SSD Optimizer.

 

dimension6 - could you go into your machine's BIOS and check under the "Advanced" section and see if you only have the option to "Show" or "Hide" RAID options, or if you instead have the option for AHCI or IDE?

 

Hmm, I couldn't see the screenshot for whatever reason..!? But I suspect it's the one where CrystalInfo shows that the drives support TRIM.

Even though the drives themselves support TRIM, is doesn't mean that they are receiving the command from Windows, which was what I was asking, considering that the RAID controller is still in use for JBOD, and supposedly does not support TRIM..... If that makes sense..!?

 

There are no RAID options at all, and hitting CTRL+I does nothing on bootup. The RAID controller exists on the motherboard, but the SSD is not plugged into it.

 

I finally got my Z, it's Z116 Core i5 540m with 128GB (2x64GB) setup.

Crystal Disk result...



Zoinks had 360~ read seq result which is much better with the same setup. However this was after he broke the raid, had them as JBOD with TRIM and then rebuilt the RAID. Before he did all those I think I saw his first result was around 277~

Could it be the TRIM restored some of the disk performance while in JBOD? Could you confirm Zoinks? maybe run another Crystal Disk test to see if you're getting constant result?

Thanks!

 

That last part can't be. You get brand new drives, so performance should'nt matter even if trim is off.

 

Let's hear more about this fan noise. I need a decibel measurement. Anyone own an extensive testing lab with sound booth, and also have vast experience in performing tests? What's that you say? Notebookcheck.net? Oh ok I'll wait a few months then...

 

I would like to ask all new Z owners:

How does the battery sit in the laptop? Is it tight or loose?

Thanks!

 

It's not a "carbon craze", rather just an employment of the design principle of "Honesty of Materials". HoM means you let the materials speak for themselves instead of painting over them. Clear lacquer, glaze, anodization or varnish do not violate the principle. Basically, if you cut down a millimeter into the surface, is that material the same as what you see on the surface?

Two examples: 1) Sydney opera house interior and exterior: everything you see is either glass, clear-glazed tiles, timber, raw concrete, granite, stainless steel or some other structural material; 2) Most Apple products, MacBooks are either raw aluminium or raw polycarbonate and glass. There is no paint anywhere in either.

Example of HoM failures: 1) HP laptops with swirly lines painted all over them to make them look "designy". 2) that Nokia/SE/Motorola phone you used to own where all the paint wore off from the corners

So, considering that the Z series has a clear-coated or tint-coated aluminium chassis and raw plastic keys, then it is reasonable to say that the premium carbon lid is more in keeping with the general design of the machine.

Note, really raw carbon reinforced plastic is never used because the epoxy resin breaks down with exposure to UV light. The clear coat filters out the UV.

ps, does anyone who's seen the silver Z (which is an HoM fail) know if the aluminium chassis is totally raw, or painted with a clear coat? thx.

 

I have seen the silver version of the Z in the Sony building in Japan. The silver paint was starting to wear off at the edges.

 

By the way, ZoinksS2K has confirmed that the separate palmrest is just cheap plastic with silvery paint on it

What a shame.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=6009753&postcount=77

 

Loose, as I mentioned before.

 

The cheap plastic palmrest actually solve the heat problem of the previous z with aluminium palmrest. Just a trade off. If sony let me choose, I will still pick the one that will fix the heat issue.

 

Does anybody know of better monitoring tools for watching the Intel Turbo Boost work? I found Intel's gadget, but I was looking for more detail, like on a per-core basis.

I think I've seen something like this before, just don't know what it is or where to find it.

Link to Intel's gadget: http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=18353&lang=eng

Here's a screen cap of some of the things I'll be using as I build up my test bench for my analysis.

 

Wow...Is this confirmed even the HDD version of the Z will not be getting the TRIM commmand

 

Guys, let's get the facts straight here...we all know that the reliability will decrease if RAID 0 is used, especially with quad drives. However, is reliability, in theory, worse than a single HDD? I would stick to RAID 0 if reliability of a quad SSD is still better than a single HDD for the time being, then ride this issue out, and hope that someone in the near future comes up with a TRIM-enabled RAID system.

 

Here's a decibel test from a Japanese review. According to the results, new Z is slightly more quiet both in idle mode or under stress.

Is 40db a lot? I have no clue

 

If we assume reliability of Sony SSD is the same as that of say Intel X-25M, then

o if reliability of 1 SSD > reliability of 1 HDD, I will stick with X-25M
o if reliability of 1 HDD > 1 SSD, then the HDD will be chosen.

This assumes the metric of importance is only reliability, but in both scenarios, the single storage drive will win. Unless Sony uses a Samsung SSD that is significantly more reliable than X-25M, in which case the JBOD option should be used.

 

Can anyone confirm the keyboard backlight doesn't work while playing full-screen games?

I'm just running my first game, Batman AA, and the backlight, she no workie.

 

My take on this is that the issue is not absolute reliability of RAID versus JBOD, but rather "how much".

While I agree that statistically a RAID 0 arrangement is less reliable than a single drive, the real question is "how much" less reliable.

If we were talking failure rates of once every few weeks, or even once every few months, then yeah, a single drive makes more sense.

But in real life, we're probably talking about failure rates of less than once a year.

And at that point the more important factor is your backup process and how easy it is to restore.

In order to get maximum throughput 364+ days a year, I'm willing to risk an hour a year restoring.

 

Hah. Ha, ha. Ha ha ha.

[Uncontrollable laughter]

From a sysadmin point of view, dealing with quality issues on a daily basis, the above two statements are hilarious to me, because they read like if you had written:

"If we assume reliability of Fossil watch is the same as that of say Omega Seamaster,"
and
"a Casio watch that is significantly more reliable than Seamaster"

Make no mistakes, Samsung is NOT considered the pinnacle of quality when it comes to SSDs. Rather the opposite. They have plenty of, and cheap models, and can often be "good enough" for a given purpose, especially if considering price. But to compare any Samsung drive to an X-25 is ridiculous and completely unfair to Samsung.

 

"Probably" makes no sense here. If you mean that more than 50% of users will be able to run for a year without a breakdown, you are "probably" right. But that doesn't help the rest, does it?

And whether you have to send the whole laptop back for drive replacements, and wait weeks for it to return. I think that small inconvenience would be enough to tip the scales of purchase choice for some informed buyers.

You're going to restore to a broken drive?

 

That depends on how Sony does their disk duplication.

For write speeds, if they copy empty blocks too, they will reduce the number of blocks that the drive has available for immediate writes.

And for read speeds, it depends on whether the duplication process align the partitions to stripe boundaries. Or whether they guys in the factory cell go "huh?" if someone uses phrases like "stripe boundaries".

 

Obviously the restore is only good for software related crashes and/or where you're willing to remove the bad drive from service.

For hardware related issues, then yes, for many users it can represent an issue.

I'm fortunate to live near PortableOne, who services my units quite, quite quickly.

 

If I was the sony project leader on new Z I would chose same solution for SSD configuration. Only thing I would change about it is proprietary size of SSDs and proprietary connector. If wight or size of Z would increase because of standard 1.8 drives then so be it (it definitely wouldn't be big difference).

In other words they should just let the users replace RAID SSDs easily if they want. Proprietary staff is what's killing Sony but they don't know it yet

Putting samsung SSDs in RAID 0 configuration is only way to have decent capacity and speed in same time and for the price people are willing to pay. For any other solution that allow you to have 512GB SSD with good performance you will be able to buy decent used BMW

 

Thanks!

Mine is also a bit loose.

 

arth1, given your experience with SSDs, how many samsung 4x128=512Gb SSDs would fail out of 1000 after 1 year of use in the vaio z's raid 0, win7 environment? a failure meaning any one drive in the array.

With absolutely no knowledge of the rates of failure, i'm going to say that less than 50 in 1000 will fail in the 1st year. Now rather than telling me what's wrong with my #, tell me what your estimate would be.

It seems to me that the question of how reliable is a really big deal to whether people go JBOD, or stick with an HD or throw an intel ssd in its place, or not buy the z in the first place. the trim-while-in-raid is just performance, whereas having to replace a custom-made ssd (and losing data) is a real dealbreaker. In a lot of your answers you suggest that the reliability in RAID isn't good enough - what's not good enough in concrete terms, in your estimation?

 

I hear you, wilbert. I always use a single typical notebook HDD as a bar for SSDs to reach in terms of reliability, which means if Quad SSD in RAID 0 is more reliable than a single HDD, please drop this issue. It is good enough, period. Ride this out until someone is bright enough to combine TRIM and RAID, then we can show off.

 

Box just arrived under an hour ago. here are quick pictures, Z not even initialed/turned on yet

 

MTBF for SSD's is in the million hour range. I'll take the gamble with those odds.

This is with the knowledge that the estimate is best case. Heck, divide it by 4 and I'm still OK.

My viewpoint on the whole reliability thing is simple: Nothing beats a good data backup and extended warranties work.

 

Very nice indeed

I really prefer the black carbon/anodized aluminium setup. Great choice

 

I had few choices since I ordered very early.

 

Just take the compliment!

 

Zoinks: On a scale of 1 to 10, what's your overall impression/rating of the Z?

 

Batman AA? What did you get under the benchmark for FPS?

BTW - thanks for answering everyone's questions!

 

dhwlaw,

I'm in the 7-8 range right now. Terribly fast little bugger. Without stealing the glory from my proper review (to be posted after I get the VPCZ11FHX/XQ).

Likes:

• Screen - decent viewing angles, bright, good color
• Keyboard - Seems a little shallower than the old Z, but works well and the backlight is greatness
• Chassis - Feels great, solid, light, easy to disassemble
• Speed - Darn peppy. HDD is great, GPU plays Bioshock 2 reasonably well
• Other - The wireless switch is much easier to use in the dark or when hidden from view, better placement of wireless/battery/HDD activity lights, easier to see them while typing.

Dislikes/gripes

• No eject button on the DVD drive, but the dedicated button on the keyboard works pretty early in the BIOS post process
• Auto switching graphics seems a bit gimmicky. Stays in speed while on AC, but I haven't really played with it yet.
• Plastic palm rest - doesn't make it look/feel cheap or anything, just disappointing. It may end up being a good thing as it stays at room temp most of the time.
• No cover for the Ethernet port as in the older model. I'm probably in the minority here, but I like the plastic cover on my Z591
• Docking port - The old Z had a sliding cover over the docking port, the new has a removeable part. I hated the old way because the slider always opened. Hate the new one because it is just another thing that can be lost.

sirhatt,

On the speed setting and with all default settings for 1600x900:
Min - 9
Max - 49
AVG - 17

I was able to get the average to 22 by killing motion blur, which is playable. You can probably get more if you disable the PhysX acceleration, which worked, BTW.

 

I put "gripes" next to dislikes because none of them are a huge deal. Nothing so far has made me second guess my pending order for the VPCZ11FHX/XQ.

And yes, I'm a tough grader. The thing would need to cook me breakfast and eject $1 bills every hour to get a 10

 

No offense. What you're saying is good sense from a customer point of view & I agree with you on that.

The thing is that Sony is a business & not a charity organization. If I'm Sony, I'll probably do the same thing. IMHO, from a business point of view, it makes good sense to use a proprietary size of SSDs and proprietary connector. You do know how much Sony charges for their spare parts right? If a customer needs to buy a replacement spare part & doesn't bulk at the high price, then Sony wins. If that spare part costs "so much" that it is deemed to be "silly to pay for that" to the customer, then he/she will probably end up buying a new notebook as a replacement instead since doing so makes "better sense". Sure, there's a high chance that the customer will be pissed off & buy the replacement notebook from a competitor instead but if Sony is able to consistently chunk out new products as unique as the VAIO Z, then there will still be a very high chance for that customer to buy another VAIO as his/her next notebook.

At least, I'll be willing to take this risk if I'm Sony. IMHO, a business is basically "all about being able & willing to take calculated risks," no?

 

I've read every page of this thread and just went back to page 80 with no info. Are you sure someone posted a pic of the backlit keyboard setting in this thread?

 

This is sounding a lot more promising! So on the "Advanced" screen in BIOS is there an AHCI option ? or any other options?

 

It's somewhere here since I saw the picture.. But then, the laptop obviously has a pre-installed VAIO control software that allows you few settings including backlight keyboard that can be switched off XX seconds after you stopped typing on it.

So yes... the backlight don't stay turned on..

 

I've read every page too and I've never seen anyone post a pic of the backlit settings.

Does anyone know yet if the new batteries still have battery drain and how much they lose? I'm assuming we won't know this for a while since people will be playing with their new laptops 24/7, but you never know!