New Z model with Intel Core i5 CPU

The sad of the matter is Owner's Manuals never come in the box. You have to download them from a site. The average consumer, I don't think would know where to locate the manual. Think of poor Grandma Kettle, ya think she's gonna know anything about TRIM and ya think she's gonna figure out where to download the manual and firmware update on her SSD? Chances are, she's never visited an Intel, Samsung on Nvidia site. She's over at QVC and HSN looking for the latest in Kettles for her kitchen. This is too expensive of a computer to not support TRIM, especially for the average consumer who purchases this Z.

Never assume Grandma Kettle won't purchase a Z, because you know she will based on looks, size and weight alone. These criterias fits her need, therefore, when she travels to reunions, she can share pics of her grand kids via HDMI.

 

is the wiper.exe any good? I have just emailed samsung semiconductor to see if our drive supports TRIM.

 

Well if its a new samsung drive I will give it the benefit of the doubt for now! Samsung is typically a solid company, so hopefully the newer drive will be much improved. I don't expect intel like performance, as that's too expensive even at this machines price point. The old samsung drives were pretty bad though.

 

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Here is an article on how to check if our samsung drive supports TRIM.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631&p=19

 

PC Pro have reviewed the new i7 Z. Their findings on battery usage make me glad I bought the WG/B and didn't hold out for the i7. I drive CAD most of the day, and don't fancy barely and hour of battery under a heavy workload.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/laptops/355384/sony-vaio-vpcz11z9e-b

Note that the new model does not surplant the old model at the top of the Ultraportable A-list.
Still, it's a pretty thorough review, but disappointing in it's findings.

I'd like the screen and graphics card upgrade, and the backlit keyboard, but I'll give the rest of it a miss for now. Maybe the new model at the end of the year will sort out these problems and be worth an upgrade, or maybe I'll be waiting until next year.

 

Thanks. But it was posted at #1668 yesterday by salt992. But you're not the only one concerned about it. I went from must buy to hmm...not so sure.

 

AS SSD and ATTO Disk Benchmark suites and read performance peaked around 600MB/sec, with write speeds topping out at around 430MB/sec !!!

 

I don't find those results disappointing. Z51 lasted 1:33 under 100% load so almost 1h for new Z is OK because of 330M.

But 10 hours for old Z51 doesn't sound credible at all. My Z11 was able to reach 9h (according to Vista estimator) only when idling with minimum LCD backlight. Did Sony transform 4-5h of surfing and word processing with Z11 into 10h with Z51?

 

I'm wondering if the lesser resolution 1600x900 screen will give more battery life, as my eyes may prefer it. Considering the glowing review apart from battery life I will still consider the Sony. I am usually around an AC outlet when I use my laptops and don't plan on any habitual heavy gaming. Nice to know the power is there though when needed. As far as price is concerned I think it is comparable to the MBP's I've been buying, especially the Signature Edition $2349 with matted aluminum. I have a Maxtor 500 GB exterior drive that uses USB, not firewire, and video editing seems to work well, although I will still use the MBP as the main desktop video machine.
It's the weight to power ratio that really interests me. A 3 hour battery normal use average more than meets my needs.

 

is there any review of the i5 + GT330 new Z??? Are they shipping it yet??

 

Those battery test results in PC Pro seem odd. I mean 5.5h would have sounded ok, but saying it's half the previous Z strikes me as suspicious. Is it possible that 1080p has that effect?

 

Maybe it's just Sony Power Management software not yet optimized for new Z? While it may be possible to achieve 10h with more agrresive power management, 5.5h is more than respectable for 60Wh battery and fast CPU.

 

The lower resolution screen likely will have better battery life.
Somewhere earlier in this thread there was a link to a Sony interview or video where they said they had to increases the brightness of the backlight something like 30% because of the higher density of transistors on the 1920x1080 LCD.
So for a given screen brightness the lower resolution LCD will draw less power.
How much it helps, I don't know.

 

Hey guys just wondering if the normal silver LID finish is made of aluminum like the signature version?

 

The Z series has an optical S/PDIF audio output port, according to the specs page on pc pro. I've not seen mention of this before. Where do they get this from?

 

anyone please?

 

Where do you have it from that the Signature Edition is made of aluminium?

 

It is disappointing how most of the people posting in this thread complain about this and that without ever having the need for either.

A serious Z buyer should distinguish between what their actual needs are and what their fantasy dream machine might be.

Having a custom setup (using the original raid cable part ordered separately) and one of the first iterations of the Z I have been using mine with the specs listed bellow at an average of 18 hours a day and the RAID array got filled up two to three times a week with RED One footage.

A side note for people who complain that 600MB read and 400MB write will not be of any use, RED One footage from my camera runs at an average of 2GB per minute or 120GB per hour of 4K uncompressed RAW footage for 24fps (4K means 4000x2000 pixels at 10bit colour depth per channel)
With the current setup I get to edit and do compositing in realtime.

So the answer is a huge NO, you will not have any issues whether TRIM is supported or not if you run your normal applications and games. And if you are still concerned then, soon as you get your laptop make a backup of the recovery partition onto a set of DVDs and rebuild the RAID into JBOD.
TRIM problem solved.
Still want RAID 0 or 1 ? do it within windows.

 

No one is saying the high speeds are useless - just that for MOST every day users those speeds are not terribly useful. For MOST users, random small read/writes are what matter. You are not most users - you are talking about serious video work, which presumably is one of the application where the high sustained read/write speed offered by this setup will be helpful.

I don't get what you are saying by no issues. Even every day users report obvious slowing of SSD drives over time if TRIM is not enabled. Do I "need" the crispness a new SSD provides - no, not really. But if I'm spending over 2 grand on a machine which has SSDs, I darn well EXPECT it. Tests have shown certain models of fully degraded Samsung SSDs are SLOWER than Western Digital Velociraptor HDDs. I'm not paying huge bucks for a machine with SSDs only to have the disk performance be WORSE than an HDD in a few months. So yes, for me, TRIM is important.

Are you saying TRIM should work with JBOD? If so this is great news. Of course, Sony still has to be using SSDs that support TRIM and a controller that supports TRIM - all of that remains to be seen. I'm sure once these machines are released there will be some exhaustive reviews as people try all possible methods to get TRIM working.

 

Well, obviously there was no release in Japan yesterday...
According to one poster who went into a major electronics store here (post 810), the old Z is out of stock and they're expecting another shipment at the end of the week (for the old Z). After that, it's finished. I would be surprised if there is no announcement of the new Z in Japan by next week.

 

I havent seen it on the website tho, so i duno if it even exists...

 

I asked a VAIO salesman in Shinjuku nishi guchi Yodobashi camera, he told me the new Z would be announced in March but avaibility would be more at the end of March.
I told him it was already announced with preorder everywhere in the world, he replied : there is "special model for Japan".
I don't know if it's true or this is just the "typical reply" when you don't know...
But it's weird how slow Sony Japan is slow compared to the other countries for this notebook.
I ll try to go to the Sony Outlet store in Odaiba next week end, I ll probably learn more .

 

Concerning the battery life, I agree that it's lower than before...
But the bigger size battery is only adding 160grms to a 1.4kg pc!
Honestly I will go for the bigger size battery, it will allow me to reach 7-8h battery time which is perfect for long flight .

 

preach, brother. church, tabernacle.

 

"Normal" applications do >90% random read and writes. Your quoted usage is >90% sequential reads and writes. Excelling at the latter does not imply excelling at the former.
Usually it's a tradeoff, where the best devices for random IO are the worst for sequential IO, and the best devices for sequential IO are the worst for random IO.
Which is why CF cards calibrated for photo and storage use behave very differently from those calibrated for industrial use.

Also, when you stream a large file onto disk, you do very few writes -- as few as possible per gigabyte. On the other hand, when you install a software package with tens of thousands of tiny files, you'll get tens of thousands of write operations. Plus, normal workstation use means lots of tiny random access writes, updating database files, writing and erasing tiny temporary files, and much more. Chances are that most of the writes to your SSD drives aren't from your video capture -- despite the byte count being high, the number of individual writes are low.

Trim isn't very useful in your situation, because you won't have any tiny "holes" in the storage that have to be reconsolidated -- you do large writes that do entire blocks at a time. However, for regular PC use, it becomes far more important, just because most files are small, and leave unfilled "holes" in the storage blocks. Since the SSD can't write less than a full block at a time, to get rid of these holes, it must otherwise do an expensive read-write-erase-copy operation. That problem is one you don't get with your huge files.

tl;dr: Large file writes/erases don't benefit from TRIM, while large numbers of small writes/rewrites do.

 

Keep in mind that the large battery sticks out on the bottom, so while it may be OK for table use, it may not be so nice for lap use. YMMV. You may also want to take this into consideration when buying a bag.

 

After reading everyone's post concerning the lack of TRIM issue, I am a little worry myself. Can someone tell me how bad can these slow down get? Can it get so bad that it would become slower than a normal 5400 rpm hard drive? If so is there a way to prevent that from happening by avoiding random write as much as possible? I simply want to enjoy the benefits of super fast load times in games/programs and windows start up. If I only use my SSD for games/program installation, would it still slow down over time. For example temporary files from windows, temporary internet files from your webbrowser and etc. Any suggestions?

 

Any suggestions on how good or bad the Raid 0 setup will be for linux installation. I'll mostly be using ubuntu and would like to upgrade every six months as per its release cycle.

Does ubuntu 9.10 supports TRIM ?

What about backups and restore in case of multiple OSes ? Is it feasible ?

 

Shucks. This thread moves too quickly for me to follow all the posts.

If Sony's battery life claims in the past are anything to go buy, 3 hours is highly unlikely if you want to use a proper graphics chipset. More like 1 hour or so. 3 hours in stamina mode, maybe.

 

actually there is a new i7 one soon so this thread should be renamed to

"New Z model with Intel Core i5/i7 CPU"

 

My old SSD is G.SKill falcon without TRIM it slower around 50% it still faster than normal hdd but still pretty bad

 

I use TrueCrypt to make encrypted file containers. If I did most of my work within a 10GB file container, for example, how would this affect SSD write usage/performance..?

What I'm trying to ask is, if I change a small file inside the container, would the whole 10GB need to be re-written on the SSD, or only the page(s) of the file that are changed..???

(EDIT: is page the right term for the smallest writable section of the SSD..?)

 

TrueCrypt only rewrites what needs to be rewritten. Otherwise it would be very very slow.. right?

Anyway for my experience, I have no problem with any slowing down of my 2yr old SSD harddrive. For me this TRIM-debate seems like much talk not not really a big problem.

 

No, the whole file would not be rewritten. The block you actually change, plus enough blocks on either or both sides to make up a full "sector" would.

An example may clarify.

Say you have the following data on the disk

AAAABBBBCCCCDDDDEEEEFFFFGGGGHHHH

Let's pretend that your block size is 4 bytes (in reality, it's 512 or 4096 bytes), and the sector size is 16 bytes (in reality, it's likely 128 kB).

You then change a single byte:

AAAABBBBCCcCDDDDEEEEFFFFGGGGHHHH

The OS and file system uses a 4 byte cluster size, and tells the drive to rewrite the CCCC block to CCcC.

The drive has a minimum block size (in our example) of sixteen bytes, and will have to do the following:

Read AAAABBBBCCCCDDDD into memory
Overlay CCcC on top of CCCC in memory
Write AAAABBBBCCcCDDDD to an already erased (prepared) area on disk.
Change the mapping pointer for the block to point to the newly written area
Mark the old sector as "free" in the BAM.

In reality, the drive may now contain:
AAAABBBBCCCCDDDDEEEEFFFFGGGGHHHHAAAABBBBCCcCDDDD

... but when queried from the computer, it will show as
AAAABBBBCCcCDDDDEEEEFFFFGGGGHHHH

However, if the disk has been in use for a while, and every block has been written to at least once, the drive may have to first erase an unused sector. Erasing is VERY slow, so it's avoided as much as possible during normal use.

And here is where TRIM comes in handy. Simplified, when a drive, OS and file system supports TRIM, the OS can send the drive information about blocks that it no longer uses. The drive can then, in spare moments in the background, erase those blocks, preparing free space ahead of time for new writes. This alleviates the problem that occurs once all the blocks have been written to.

When you rewrite something, the drive will know where the freed up blocks are. But when you erase something, the drive won't know that those blocks are free too -- the housekeeping for that is normally done at file system level by the OS, and the drive won't know. So the larger the number of deletes that happens on a system, the more the drive will benefit from TRIM.

The worst kind of use scenario for an SSD drive are random writes and appends. These types of operations cause a large amount of sector reallocation that isn't proportional to the amount of data written. And yes, writing to a "container" file (like a file system image) counts as that type of access. Simply put, SSDs aren't optimal for that kind of use, and favour large contiguous writes. TRIM helps, but doesn't solve the problem.

 

You have a point there.
I stand corrected.

 

50% faster for "overall" use, I take it?
What's the speed for random write operations?

 

i think he meant that it's slowed down about 50% but that it's still faster than a regular hdd

 

Good thing about this lack of TRIM support is that it's yet another reason for doing regular backups .

 

Also, just because it lacks TRIM, it does not mean that the Z-series will also lack a version of BGC (background garbage collection), which does the same function that TRIM does (reduce the drive read/write speed degeneration over time), just a lot less elegantly.

 

How large is a large file?
also i keep hearing that if you do a complete reformat (not sure if this is the correct term) it will speed your ssd back to how it was when you first started using it. if this is true, how easy or hard is it to reformat the drive?

 

@arth1: Thanks for the example; very comprehensive.

I wonder if they will eventually come up with an SSD whereby any random byte can be read from and written to individually without all this current overhead nonsense...

If RAM can be accessed in this way, why isn't flash the same..? Perhaps someone with a bit of semiconductor physics expertise could explain it to the layman...???

 

It's not a physical issue. RAM will have the same issue. In that case, the OS (and the apps on top of it) manage the recollection of unused bytes. If you had a program running with a memory leak, your RAM will begin to fill up and not be released.

-Peter

 

But if you want to write to an address in RAM, you don't have to erase a whole block first then write in the modified block like with SSDs. You write direct to that address. Now if flash devices can do that, then we're on to a winner..!

 

Engadget just posted a review: http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/11/sony-vaio-z-series-vpcz114gx-s-review/

They had nothing to say but positive things (surprising imo), but they detailed a lot more about battery life and stuff like that. After reading it, I'm sold, but I might opt for the bigger battery. Only thing that irked me is that they said nothing about the SSD performance degradation.

 

What is the new Vaio Z made out of exactly? To me the older ones felt cheap and plastic.

 

I am missing the information on upgrade options from the review. It sounds as if the i5-540M, 192 GB SSD was the only possible configuration. No word on i7 and 512 GB Quad SSD. We know, that there are better specs, but i suppose many engadget readers don't.

 

I am also surprised they didn't say any negative things since Engadget is Apple fanboy heaven and they usually trash anything that's not Apple but at the same time, the "review" was lacking, it felt more like a "preview / quick hands-on". I was at least expecting more details on the temperature (EXACT numbers) and SSD degradation over time.

 

Great find. And pretty thorough review (apart from the missing SSD performance points)... This one is very similar to the model I have preordered (although mine is an i5-520M with a 128GB SSD). I am still contemplating going for a full HD model - but this looks great...

 

Engadget aren't known as tech journo leaders - more like a Hello! magazine of tech, skimming the surface, missing out vital details and serving up a load of froth/ads.

Let's wait until notebookcheck.de rip the Z apart...