New Z model with Intel Core i5 CPU

Theres no chance a quad raid setup will ever be slower than a conventional HD even if degraded to max it's like a 30% performance drop on a single Samsung SSD and that's with the drive full to capacity and no garbage collection being done on it so that it has to erase before it writes data. The other thing I haven't seen mentioned is a raid setup uses write caching and it reserves a portion of the drive space outside of the primary partition so in effect the drives would never become "full" and end up having to erase before writing because it would always have this portion of the array available and cache the data before writing so in effect even if the primary partition became in a "full" degraded state you still wouldn't notice much of a difference because the only thing you notice is the writing to the cache, the subsequent move from cache to primary partition is done in the background.

Add to that the pretty much every modern day SSD has garbage collection in the firmware which is far more important than trim because trim can't even erase blocks unless they are empty which they won't be without the garbage collection it really does seem like a non issue. I am going to do some reading up on it and see what i can find it seems to me people are making a much greater deal out of this than it really is even given a worse case scenario of 100% full SSD's.

 

I am confused. Why can't you use trim with raid? Trim runs at a firmware level from my understanding. That means the raid will be a level above that.

I think TRIM is a big thing, but I also think Sony knows that. This isn't their first foray into SSD technology. They will have something up their sleeve to stop the drives from becoming slow.

They are designed for the executive market. If an executive at my company said that his laptop was running slow after only a couple of months of heavy use, that would probably be the last vaio we ever brought. All it takes is one bad experience to alienate.

 

Because for trim to work it would have to be implemented in the raid controller firmware and there is not yet any raid controller supporting that.

The more I think about it the more I think Sony would purposely not add trim support due to the fact the average user can do alot more harm than good with trim. Opposed to garbage collection which only erases blocks as needed a user on the other hand could manually run trim once a week or so and severely shorten the life of their HD due to constantly erasing pages before the drive is full you are perpetuating many more write/erase cycles than neccesary and given the limited number of erase/write cycles in the lifespan of an SSD you could potentially shorten the life of your shiny new SSD by years without even realizing your doing it. And that could be a huge headache for Sony a year or so down the road when they are getting a bunch of laptops back for warranty replacement due to users thinking they were doing the right thing by running trim once a week. I think it's much safer for Sony to leave the trim up to the garbage collection routine in firmware to do it only when it's neccessary.

 

Exactly - there are two special "single" SSDs used only for the 192gb and 384gb models. The rest of the SSDs are doubles.

Where it gets confusing is how Sony USA tells you how many *physical* drives you're getting, but not how many logical drives. Some other countries are indicating how many logical drives (for example, Sony US shows 256gb as 1 x 256gb, but another country recently mentioned showed their version as 4 x 64gb, which would be 2 x physical 128gb).

 

But the Z isn't released yet? Also, raid controllers can have firmware upgraded as well. I suggest that people need to stop worrying about this problem. Degeneration of SSD's is a known flaw in the technology and has been for quite a while now. I would say that Sony understands, and has planned an evolution to its solution based around the flaw.

In other words, Sony would look stupid for releasing one of the industries most expensive laptops and overlooking the fact they are going to start running slow after a couple of months.

 

It's definitely not worth worrying about to the extent some folks make it out to be on here. Garbage Collection routines in the firmware essentially do the same thing trim does only it doesn't require user interaction. These degradation scenarios that people read in these reviews that scare everyone are all done by purposely loading up a drive to full capacity as fast as possible and then running benchmarks before garbage collection has had a chance to do it's thing. 99% of users could never fill an SSD to capacity fast enough for the garbage collection not to keep up and do it's thing such as these reviews do but even if they somehow did manage it eventually the garbage collection (At least on the Samsung which does background GC) would catchup and much of the performance would be gained back over time. It just doesn't happen all at once like it does with trim.

 

I don't really care about what Sony has implemented "by default", all I care is if the drives support TRIM. As I've said, I can kill the RAID and use TRIM but that only works if the SSDs have TRIM supporting firmware.

 

I'm so confused. I was about to pull the trigger on a Z today. The laptop is perfect for my needs.

But I'm not going to spend >$500 in SSD storage if it's going to eventually perform worse than a mechanical harddrive, which translates to me not getting the computer since you can't configure it with a mechanical HDD. I just don't understand though, I thought more or less SSDs are always better than HDD's, which is why they're so much damn money.

Are you guys basically saying that, as of now, the Z isn't worth getting because of this? You guys are deciding my fate with the Z, more or less.

I'm not going to spend this much money, especially this much on SSD storage, if it's actually going to less for me than a typical HDD at some point.

 

I doubt it. Samsung's trim is in the firmware:

"Samsung controllers with recent firmware take an entirely different approach. Without any interaction from the OS, the Samsung firmware is able to 'read' the drive data in the background. When the drive has been idle for a period of time, the firmware reads any NTFS volume bitmaps present and automatically frees up flash blocks not allocated by that partition. The end result is similar to using the Indilinx tool, but Samsung has the advantage in that it does not suffer from controller / driver incompatibilities and other OS-related issues. If a Samsung drive with auto-trim firmware contains an NTFS partition and is idle, it will automatically auto-trim itself in the background. Simple."

http://www.pcper.com/comments.php?nid=7488

 

If you are going to buy Z to replace both your M17x and M11x/UL30t, you should probably wait a little till the real machine is out. If you are still going to keep M17x, I think you don't really need to worry about the SSD degradation, but you really should stick with the 128GB version to keep overall price down.

I am not entirely convinced on the severity of the issue -- yes, SSD degrades, yes, when it is really degradedit could be slower than a fast HDD, yes, Windows as an OS makes SSD degrades faster than if all you do is data storage and transfer -- all true, and if not true they wouldn't bother to develop things like TRIM.

Still, that doesn't mean that based on your operation profile -- instead of people running servers or other high utilization environment -- you will see the SSD degradation before you find GT 330M long in the tooth for whatever your next big game is and need to upgrade. There are quite a few people here who really are looking for a portable workstation and will run their Z pretty much 24x7, potentially with their income on the line if their Z does not perform. To them, all the concern with RAID 0 and no TRIM is very real.

However, if you are just buying Z for personal use (including school work, your professors are generally much more forgiving than your bosses) and you are buying Z for other features that fit your need and the SSD is just a nice-to-have (but you can live with a HDD for lowered price), I don't think you really need to stress yourself out with all these talks about SSD.

 

Well that is talking about Samsungs background garbage collection. That is separate from TRIM. I *think* the newest Samsung drives support both BGC and TRIM.

 

Here is some more on it if it helps ease your mind the OCZ Summit is a Samsung drive albeit older technology, after doing some research I am satisfied this is all much ado about nothing at all:


"Samsung has implemented a feature they call "auto-TRIM", which peeks at the NTFS $bitmap to clear up unallocated areas during idle time. The advantage is these drives will recover performance given sufficient idle time, and will do so on any platform. The catch is it only works with NTFS partitions, meaning Mac and Linux users will not share the benefit seen by Windows users. Here was the OCZ Summit after running our suite:

I then refragmented it and let it sit idle for a few hours time:

The Summit was able to bring its write speed back up with no user interaction, mostly recovering by the time we ran our test. Another hour or so and it would have restored itself entirely. This means typical users should see full speed writes most of the time. Note that Samsung units self-defragment on-the-fly during sequential writes, meaning write speed returns to normal after a single sequential pass has taken place."

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=766&type=expert&pid=11


@Azmordean If the newer drives support trim when not in raid then you could theoretically drop the raid and trim each drive individually although i'm not sure why you would wan't to do that as i'm pretty sure you would then have to rebuild the array once it was done and judging by everything i've read you would see little to no performance gain for all the hassle as opposed to just letting the BG trim do it's thing automatically.

 

Has anyone heard any rumors on the pricing of the HDD based Z (asian model)?

In theory if you can get a base 128gb ssd for 1899, with a dvd drive, then you should be able to minus at least 200$ for the SSD and 50 for the drive, so I am hoping for around $1650 or something. Would be even better if it was released for $US1599!

The reason I ask, is that the S series in Australia is $2200AUD (around the same as 1900USD). That would mean it would be better to get the much more potent Z for around the same price!

I'm hoping anyway.

 

I'm confused with all this talk about TRIM. Is it speculation that Sony won't support TRIM? Or is this now a fact? Or do we have to wait and find out in March, when those that have pre-ordered have received their Z's, to inform us.

I'm gonna keep it for at least 4-5 years. I can't afford to trade-up like you, every 2 yrs. I have a Vaio A, over 5 yrs. Pentium M, and it's still keeping up its pace.

I hope your right. "Auto" GC would be ideal w/o the need for user interaction. The avg. joe, purchasing this Z, won't even know about TRIM and GC.

I was at SonyStyle today, and overheard a lady with a Z550 talking to a support tech, about never ever having done a cleanup and a defragment. And she was there looking to trade in her old Z for a New Z.

Does one still have to do Disk defragement and Disk Cleanup with SSD's?

 

First, all this means is that the Samsung drives, when not in RAID0, can automatically recover unused data based on an NTFS-formatted drive. With RAID0, the NTFS volume bitmap would be striped across multiple drives, rendering Samsung's firmware useless.

It is still better for the drive to support TRIM, which, for Samsung, only recent firmware (released in Dec 2009, I think) supports. This is preferable because the drive will be able to recover unused data regardless of the file system/OS. As well, it can then delegate who issues the TRIM command to the OS, where it should be (only the OS knows which bytes are in use and which aren't).

Supporting TRIM does not mean the user must manually run a process - that was only the case early on when the OS did not have TRIM support. Users would have to run a utility that would query the file system to see which bytes are free, and issue appropriate TRIM commands. These days, Windows 7 supports TRIM, so TRIM commands will be sent automatically.

However, whether TRIM is supported by the drive or not, it is still not supported in RAID0 configuration until the RAID controller supports TRIM. This is because only the RIAD controller knows how to decompose a file into stripes in its RAID0 array, and thus be able to free up the right bytes on the drives in the array. The intel RAID controller *might* support TRIM now, with rumors that support is for Intel SSDs only. No official word, however, of any RAID controllers supporting TRIM.

I'm not sure why you think TRIM is not that important. It's pretty clear that without TRIM support, once all cells in an SSD have been written to once, performance will degrade substantially. It is not a theoretical worst-case scenario. The drive will degrade, and for normal operation, degrade worse than a standard HD (ie small, random writes, which occur all the time by the OS). The only question is how long will it take for an SSD to degrade - that is not clear at all. It could be years, or it could be weeks, depending on usage.

No, dropping RAID will not allow you to trim each drive individually. You will need to image your RAID array, clear your SSDs (hopefully Samsung has a utility to do this - I'm not sure if they do or not), rebuild your RAID array, then place the image back onto the fresh RAID array.

Dropping a RAID0 array essentially destroys all your data as they are striped across the array. Issuing TRIM commands to an individual drive of a RAID0 array makes no sense - the program (or OS) that issues the TRIM command has no idea what bytes on an individual drive in RAID0 (or that was in RAID0) are in use and which ones aren't, so it won't be able to tell which bytes to free up.

-Peter

 

On the Dutch SonyStyle site: sonystyle.nl they offer a CTO model with HDD.
The cheapest version costs 1499 Euros (approx. 2050 USD) and has i5-520M, 4GB, 320GB HDD, no optical drive. So it costs more than the 128GB SSD + optical drive model in the USA...but that's just normal.

 

If RAID0 is in use, then the OS, RAID controller, and Drives must support TRIM individually.

Right now, Windows 7 supports TRIM - check.

The Samsung SSD drives will presumably support TRIM - Samsung has released firmware for more recent drives that enables TRIM support. Presumably the drives in the Z are recent enough to enable this support. I'd say 95% check.

The RAID controller is the big wildcard. No RAID controller officially supports TRIM yet. But it is only a matter of time - Intel has been saying they will add TRIM support for a while. But nothing official yet. No check here.

So, in a way, it is not a Sony thing. It depends mainly on the RAID controller.

Now, if you were to use JBOD instead of RAID0, treating each SSD as an individual drive, then it is probably that you will get TRIM support. However, one user called Sony Canada who indicated that they are delaying the Canadian release to make a motherboard modification in order to enable TRIM support. This is a confusing statement. What motherboard mod needs to take place? A proprietary RAID controller that supports TRIM? Or a proprietary controller that allows the SSDs to be seen as non-RAID drives? Or...?

TRIM, with OS support, is automatic - no user interaction. It was a manual process only when the OS did not support TRIM.

I can't say with confidence here (maybe arth1 can pipe in), but my guess is that file fragmentation can still occur with SSDs. Fragmentation is a function of the file system, which will map a file to appropriate blocks on disk. When a file is updated, only blocks that are modified need to be rewritten to disk, and that can cause the file to no longer reside in a contiguous block of space.

My understanding is that with Vista, automatic defragmentation occurs, lessening the need to manually run a defrag process periodically. I'd assume Windows 7 carries on that tradition. I'm not sure how RAID0 throws a wrench in the defrag equation, though.

-Peter

 

buy it, dude. chances are that these concerns are much ado about nothing at all.

I'm quite sure that before Sony put this SSD configuration in their computer, they thought about all the same sh*t we're thinking of and much more. through their testing process, they obviously didn't find this to be a problem.

If you buy it from Sony, you'll have a month to try it out and determine it is a problem or not. Sony will take care of you if you have any issues.

And in that time, we can teach you how to quickly make an image of your computer, dump your RAID configuration, and put it back on your drive.

It's something you should know how to do anyway. Everyone should.

 

Too simple. That won't work for a stripe (RAID 0), because each disk doesn't contain a valid NTFS file system.

(And even if using single drives instead of a stripe, it's a bad idea in the first place to make assumptions about a proprietary file system. Never mind that it won't work with Linux. How will it work with the next generation of NTFS? Is it guaranteed not to screw it up? Didn't think so, no...)

 

Except that with normal usage, it takes several months before SSD saturation kicks in.

Yes, Sony has thought it through. And have found that there are more people willing to pay for initial speed than those who will complain about slowdowns later (even figure out just why certain things grind to a halt, while others are just as fast as ever).

Remember, Sony makes money on (a) selling you a computer now, and (b) a replacement as soon as possible. This helps with both (a) and (b), and is a smart move by Sony.

 

Fair enough, I figure Samsung would have a similiar solution in place though since they and Sony worked togethor to create these "double sided" ssd's, they are designed specifically to be used in a raid array and I don't think there is an SSD currently in production that doesn't have some form of GC built into the firmware so it's hard to believe Samsung and Sony would put these out without it wether it be built into the drives themselves or in a controller. Do you think they would release these SSD's without some form of GC? I mean I don't know but I just can't see it happening knowing the repercussions that would follow not too far down the road.

Because i've been using an Intel G1 160gb for 2 years now with no noticeable degradation whatsoever and i've never run trim on it, it doesn't even support trim in the firmware. The GC seems to work perfectly fine to me and as I said previously all drives have some kind of gc in the firmware these days to prevent degradation. I mean i've resintalled OS 3 or more times formats every time and never wiped and it's still fast as before, scores the same on WEI etc...

Agreed which is why I said I don't know why he would want to do that, He would have to rebuild the array anyway if it was possible and it would be much easier to just image, wipe and restore but tis not my place to figure out why people want to do the things they do LOL

 

They're always better on average. Read access times are super fast, sequential reads are very fast, sequential writes are fast, and random writes are OK. The problem is that random writes will take a severe latency hit if an SSD becomes "saturated", and random writes is a substantial part of normal usage.

The effect is that after a long period of use, the user will experience frequent stalls, like the desktop freezing up for several seconds when opening a window and the OS generates thumbnails. It'll still be just as fast as always for reads, and for large writes, it won't be very noticeable.

 

The TRIM/GC is essentially the defrag process, anything the operating system sees as sequential will actually be mapped to random areas of the flash anyways so running defrag on an SSD would essentially do nothing except add unneeded write/erase cycles to it.

 

Yes, SSDs get fragmented too. But no, you would normally not run a defragmenter on them, most of all because of the sheer number of writes that a defrag run entails. SSDs have a finite number of write cycles, and doing a full defrag is a good way to reduce the life span.
There's also little benefit to running a normal deframentation on an SSD, because the SSD remaps the blocks anyhow -- just because you place a file that takes two blocks in adjacent logical blocks doesn't mean they'll be that way on the drive itself.
And for read speeds, it has absolutely no measurable impact (unless you use an extent based file system like xfs or ext4, and can reduce the number of extents by defragmenting, or there are sparse files that become sparser due to defragmenting).

What a defrag of an SSD can help with is mitigating the effects of an already saturated drive, by forcing rewrite of several smaller blocks into single blocks. This can free up enough space that a drive avoids the random-write-stalls for a while. But it's at the price of drive longevity.

And if the defragmenter isn't all that smart, it can even push the drive into supersaturation. Newer good defragmenters automatically change their algorithm for SSDs, and do read-rewrite instead of read-delete-write operations whenever possible, so they won't cause this problem. But if in doubt, or you want drive longevity, don't risk it.

 

That depends on the file system, and how it's being used. Sparse files, for example, don't need reading all the blocks of empty data, and a good defragmenter can autodetect sparse areas and discard the blocks (if sparse data is already permitted for the file). This means that after the defrag, there are fewer blocks than before.
Similar for file extents -- the continuation blocks can be reduced or eliminated, which means the file takes up fewer blocks afterwards.
Finally, some file systems also have the ability to place very small files into the inode for the file itself, which effectively reduces two reads into one.

But by and large, there's not that much benefit from defragmenting an SSD, and some pitfalls one should be aware of. See my other post on the subject.

 

So I buy this laptop, unpack it, install all my programs on it, move all my files over, etc... what do I need to do now to keep the SSD running at optimal speed? What do I have to go out of my way to do that the laptop doesn't do automatically?

 

TRIM, GC and defragmentation are three different things:

Garbage collection:
When the drive is idle, it can run an expensive (slow) "erase" operation on blocks it knows are no longer used. This ensures that there are spare blocks that can be written to quickly.

TRIM:
The OS tells the drive about which blocks are no longer used by the file system. Which gives the drive a chance to let the garbage collector erase those blocks. Otherwise, the garbage collector can only pre-erase blocks that it itself has reallocated, i.e. when you overwrite data.

Defragmentation:
This occurs on a file system level, not a hardware level. A drive doesn't understand fragmentation, because it's irrelevant to the drive whether a block is used for data or for a pointer to the next block.

Judging from your other posts here, you also seem to think that the saturation-without-TRIM problem with high latency for random writes occurs when a drive is full, as in showing 100% full. This is not the case at all. It occurs when all the blocks on the drive have been written to at least once, without the drive knowing that some of them are really free because you've deleted data too.
In other words, when a drive isn't 100% full.

 

if it starts slowing down:

image the drive with ShadowProtect Desktop, Norton Ghost, Acronis TrueImage (15 minutes)
delete raid array (1 minute)
rebuild raid array (1 minute)
restart computer and start image restoration software with boot disc (3 minutes)
expand image (15 minutes)
reboot back into windows right where you left off @ max speed again (25 seconds)

grand total time lost:

35:25

 

Wow, that is going to take sooooo much time out of my life. More than making and reading all of these posts arguing about TRIM and whatnot.

 

No not full as in having 120gb worth of data on a 120gb drive, full as in every block has been written to and not yet erased is what I was referring to. And I understand the difference between between defrag and GC/trim just easier to explain it in the sense that trim/gc to an ssd serve a similiar purpose as defrag to a conventional platter HD of restoring performance to the drive even though they are not the same thing at all. Defrag is a nono on an SSD so it's easier to get it into peoples heads that GC/Trim is to SSD what Defrag is to Platter HD so they don't go defragging their SSD's

 

What a hassle. And this is done every 3-4 months? It's like maintaining a BMW. What happened to the worry/hassle-free mentality of Japanese Products?

OMG! I hear ya'. (lol). This subject of TRIM is painstaking. I had to take a breather. I'm not going to worry too much about it. I'm sure that Sony's R&D team have resolved these issues. There's no way, a $2k-4.5k computer, will be released by Sony, and have these SSD degradation issues. Remember, Sony made vast improvements from the older Z. It's going to be a better machine in every aspect.

 

By the way, does anyone think that Sony will be generous enough to offer a similar Mobility/Productivity rebate bundle (that was being offered for the current/previous Z from around Nov. 2008 - Sept. 2009) for the new 2010 Z series?

 

SPEEDwithJJ: What rebate terms was that?

Answer to my other own question;

From Sony HK site..
Sony Style Hong Kong

Built-in Wireless LAN IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n * 7
•最高數據傳送速度: 11 Mbps (802.11b)/54 Mbps (802.11a/g)/300 Mbps (802.11n) *8 • The maximum data transfer speed: 11 Mbps (802.11b) / 54 Mbps (802.11a / g) / 300 Mbps (802.11n) * 8
•頻率: 5 GHz (802.11a/n), 2.4 GHz (802.11b/g/n) • Frequency: 5 GHz (802.11a / n), 2.4 GHz (802.11b/g/n)

No 450 WiFi.. Oh well.

 

I´m posting it again,

For business use on Z (excel, docs, web, e-mail,...) it´s better 1920x1080 ou 1600x900 LCD ?

It seems that on 13.1" panel the icons and letter will be so small.

Appreciaty comments.
Alex

 

based on everything I've read, that should be it. those numbers are not understated, based on my experiences, and I make images regularly. at least once a month... and I have been doing them faithfully for the last year. it's all a very "unattended" kind of process. meaning, you don't have to hover over it once you get the process started. you just start it and walk away. come back in 15-20 minutes and it's done.

I know some people wont' want to do it because it's just something else to do...but any computer techie will tell you that the world would be a better place if people did regular backups...and an image is a type of backup. you can have your computer automatically do these image backups daily, weekly or whatever...and if you hdd's/ssd's were to crash, all you'd need to do to get back up and running is to restore your most recent image, and nothing would be lost, save the files you were working on between the moment of crash and your most recent backup. even then, any loss should be minimal.

IMO, this will actually get people into a very good habit. Images make drive crash fears a thing of the past, if used regularly. Just have an external HDD to save the backups too.

My personal recommendation: ShadowProtect Desktop. Dead simple to use, and has worked every time for me on several computers. I've had to restore HDD's that crashed maybe 15 times last year. All 15 times with swimmingly. Once you do it, you wonder how you got by without the safety that it provides.

indeed. lol.

 

there's been discussion of this in this thread, search for "dpi". maybe somewhere online there is a clever emulator that simulates differnet screen res with scalable dpi and 'typical' usage (office, browsing etc). or maybe not...perhaps sony will write one after they sort out this TRIM issue...

 

I can't personally comment from experience...but I'd assume that a spreadsheet would be damn small at 1920x1080 on a 13.1" screen.

things like Docs and e-mail should be unaffected because you can zoom easily. a definite pro for the higher resolution is that you can have more of your spreadsheets on screen...more of everything on screen. AeroSnap might be more useful as well.

However, I would also presume web browsing would be kinda rough because most websites don't scale things like images well...and increasing font sizes often compromises the styling of websites (bad web design practices, but still).

Now...that might not be the case at all. And if your eyes are good, it may not matter.

ajreynol's Take: go to a local Sony Store if you can. Sample the product at that screen resolution and see what you think. I'm reasonably confident a Style Store would have this model or similar model with this screen resolution and form factor. or maybe have some forum members take pictures of their units as they get them in and give impressions. and if you don't mind the hassle, buy it and see. you can return it to Sony inside of 30 days if you're not happy with the high rez.

oh that's sweet.

edit: I don't see any special software emulator posted. Here are the interesting comments related to the question:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5746298&postcount=534

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5746454&postcount=536

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5748881&postcount=557

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5749419&postcount=561

....

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5805366&postcount=1180

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5805915&postcount=1182

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5807142&postcount=1183

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5810031&postcount=1185

YMMV

 

I noticed there are some people which say they have somekind of way around TRIM, for example on the OCZ technology forum (tony trim) -> http://tinyurl.com/yfph2fu. If that works good it might be the solution.

Although i think i might get the HDD version, it's cheaper, more storage and just to say it out loud ''do you really need that much speed?''. I'm starting to get intrested in the HDD version when i read all this.

For example;
RAID 0 - when 1 drive fails all data is lost
TRIM missing - drive get's slower after * months
More maintenance (reimaging and all)

 

How battery will be affected if I use 1 or 2 SSD´s ?

 

Much like there's no way a $2-$4 k computer would be released with VT disabled (which prevented 64-bit virtualization, and made 32-bit virtualization run much slower)?
That one was only resolved when Microsoft made it a requirement for running Windows 7's XP compatibility mode, and for almost a year, users had to hack their BIOS if they needed VT-x on a Z.

 

3 cheers for comparing apples to oranges.

one issue affects the daily, normal operational use of the machine. the other affects your ability to use some another OS in a virturalized environment. Yes, it would have been nice to have VT enabled by default, but you don't think that's a terrible comparison? weak virturalization support disappoints a certain cross-section of users...major degradation of machine performance would off 100% of users.

amirite?

 

I agree, as a single drive or JBOD, I expect newer Samsung drives to support TRIM as they've released firmware to do just that. In RAID0, no SSD drive will be able to use TRIM OR GC - it is a function of the RAID controller.

But you haven't used it in RAID0. That's the issue.

I should also add that there are no reports of being able to configure the SSD drives in anything other than RAID0. Hopefully that's not the case.

-Peter

 

Well I admit initially I was thinking the GC would run with the drives in RAID 0 since that is what they we're designed to do so wasn't much concern but yea if there is no GC or anything being run on the drives that could be a concern. Honestly though I find it highly unlikely Sony/Samsung would release these drives without some form of GC in place, being that the drives only work in a raid config the GC would of course also have to work with the raid config. I guess the only thing to do is wait and see. Should know in a few weeks here.

 

I don't see why degradation is a big issue, but admittedly my understanding of how SSDs work is limited so someone correct me if I'm wrong. It seems to me that even without TRIM, SSDs with some dedicated spare space and low write amplification would perform fine even when all blocks have been written to. The SSD would just write to the spare space, combining the new pages with the non-overwritten pages from the block that it was told to write to, to write to this new block in the spare region. The existing block would then be marked for reclaiming and would be erased later and becomes part of the spare region, thus the amount of spare space never diminishes. And with a well designed SSD with low write amplification this process should only be a small number of times slower than writing to a new block.

 

Actually, Raid0 wasn't the issue. it was how a drive not running TRIM handles itself over time. whether because of RAID or because of lack of TRIM support, the ultimate result is a lack of TRIM.

to that end, his experience is as valid as any.

 

Point taken. I guess many of us are viewing the issue through our own lenses. There are, no doubt, many different interests represented in this discussion. For me, once I learned that Samsung released TRIM-supporting firmware for their most recent drives, the issue was about TRIM support in RAID0.

bluehaze13's claim is that GC does a good enough job to mitigate any degradation over time. But from my perspective, TRIM or GC support in the drive are both useless in RAID0 right now.

I'd also go so far as to say that, to the average user interested in this discussion, their main worry is that their SSD won't degrade to unacceptable levels over time. To this, unless we get TRIM support in RAID0, or confirmation that we can configure the SSD as JBOD, that worry is justified.

I guess my beef is that just saying "Sony won't release their Z without addressing this issue" isn't a valid argument. The RAID controller support is out of Sony's hands. And being able to configure SSDs as JBOD, while in Sony's hands, seems like a waste - I'd rather have a single 256gig drive instead of 2 128gig drives anyday, especially for SSDs.

-Peter

 

You've basically described what GC does.

Degradation will still occur as a result of pure deletes (not just updates). When a file is deleted by the OS, the actual bytes that the file took up are not erased - only the file system's references/indexes are updated. Unless the drive can understand how a file system manages files (which the Samsung drives did for NTFS in the article posted earlier), it has no clue which bytes should be marked as free by the delete. This is what TRIM does.

-Peter

 

The current Z model ships with a RAID option. Does anyone have any experience with that one?

 

now THAT is a good question, amongst all this brain-boggling speculation

 

I had a question about the Z models that are shipping with hard drives. Since those Z models lack an optical drive, I was wondering if that meant that there is an empty space to put in a second hard drive or an SSD? I am picturing that the HDD is placed exactly where the optical drive should be, so would that mean that the place where RAID 0 SSD's are located on normal models is empty?