New Z model with Intel Core i5 CPU

people are worried that it's plastic, i think it's alu. sony wouldn't put so much time and effort into this new Z just to slap on the same plastic palm rest as the rest of it's lineup.....

 

Does anyone know when the new Z will be out in Japan?

 

I Hope its metallic also, thanks.

 

You mean like they did with the last Z and the silver plastic parts? It surely doesn't look like alu, but maybe I'll be surprised

Ordering is possible from 25th February, first pieces will come to the home of their new owners on 6th March.

 

Thanks for the swift reply.

I don't live in Japan but I will be there between March 3 and March 9. Is it possible to buy the laptop from some shop in Japan or even at the Sony building?

 

Interesting . Funny thing is: the people that don't have a clue about Z series are first one to have new Z in there hands .

 

Dunno about Sony building, but I'm worried it will be too early for normal shops. But maybe I'm wrong. Surely you can't buy e.g. premium patterns in normal shops.



About the palmrest...another thing which makes me believe it's plastic is Felica card reader on Japanese Z. Till now, the Felica card didn't work through aluminum chases, that's why previous Z had this hideous plastic cut next to the touchpad.


While new Z is "nice and clean"

 

Yes. You are right. Sony Asia states that it uses alu.
"High Durability & lightweight: Carbon top cover & single-piece milled aluminium palm rest"
http://www.sony-asia.com/product/vpcz117gg

 

I don't think keys can mark the screen, it looks like there is air between the screen and keys on this one. Unless the top would flex alot I don't think it would touch the keys:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3gY9d9Xcy8

Also the Palmrest is aluminum.

 

Yes single-piece milled aluminum palm rest...except the actual palmrest At least it's not single-piece for sure than ,)

Well the same space is on current Z. But the screen is thin and that's why quite flexible.

Any proof about the palmrest?

 

I thought palm rest and palmrest is the same thing..So it is not?

 

More info/review, from impress.co.jp

http://translate.googleusercontent....le.com&usg=ALkJrhgZrNS__XHsGeMzt07FLMHRpaY41A

 

I have a z song:

palm rest palmrest ssd TRIM
palm rest palmrest ssd TRIM
palm rest palmrest ssd TRIM
palm rest palmrest ssd TRIM

 

Well on the previous Z they called single-piece milled aluminum palm rest the whole part with keyboard. That's why they were proud it's "single-piece". In this case, they separated actual palmrest from the rest of it. I believe they still call "single-piece milled aluminum palm rest" the piece which includes keyboard. No word about the actual (plastic ) palmrest.

Well isn't it relatively important comparing to previous Z? btw...there will be no TRIM with slattering Samsung drives (my opinion )

 

こちらはブラックだが、インタラクションテーブルと呼ばれるパームレスト部は樹脂による別パーツ
Anyone can translate this sentence? I think it can answer the question.
BTW, it is from http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/topic/feature/20100216_349197.html

 

Saw the same thing milled aluminum palmrest. and if you look at the vids it is shiny aluminum same as the rest. Watch this vid at 0:24 when he turns it you can see its same aluminum. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb2oY2Ow3GI Actually I think maybe that is old Z even though video only posted 1 week ago?

 

Great find! The review is fairly detailed (what I could get out of the translation), but no word on heat/fan noise. However 6+ hours on stamina mode with Core I7 - sounds like battery life is comparable to the I5.

-Peter

 

looked up the SamsungMMCRE28G code and it appears it belongs to a 128GB SSD so the almost 60GB shown by the POST photo is weird.
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/products/flash/ssd/2008/product/pcLineup.html

 

Not at all.

64GB x2 in each board = 128GB

 

Yep it says it's plastic...

Picture for this sentence...

It's the previous Z...

 

It's also a lot less practical. I have the "stick adapter" for my SR that came with a rebate bundle and I use it for my dock, while the stock adapter comes with me for travel. The power cable (not the thicker cable) is like... 8 inches long and doesn't extend, which may often lead to the brick hanging off your notebook.

Anyways....

Wonder if Sony will bring back the rebate bundle..

 

Lot of info there and some great pics, thanks for link! Look at that Windows Experience Index:

Processor 6.9
メモリ Memory 5.9
グラフィックス Graphics 6.4
ゲーム用グラフィックス Gaming graphics 6.4
プライマリハードディスク Primary hard 7.6

That is better than alot of desktops LOL

 

No worries, plastic is good, imagine if they used metal keys on the keyboard? You would freeze your fingers when it's cold and burn them when it's hot Same thing on Palmrest, probably metal is a bad idea even if it looks cool.

 

No, but it only does something to write speeds, not read speeds. Unless you run HDTach in write mode, it shouldn't show any difference at all, so that's no surprise.

And unless your drive has reached saturation, you will not see a huge difference for writes ether -- a small positive difference, but nothing amazing. It's when a drive has reached saturation, that TRIM makes a huge difference. Mostly by preventing a drive from reaching saturation in the first place

 

Well I have metal palmrest and I love it...it was one of the main reasons why I was buying Z...that it doesn't have cheap plastic palmrest like my TX ,)

 

Now this is very interesting. It shows the drive model number, but even more interesting, it shows four drives, which is very good news, and that it uses an isw software "fakeraid", not a real raid controller.
That's actually good news too, because it means that users who don't want to risk a big stripe can drop it.

 

Another great find. The pictures are terrific! I'd love a better translation than what Google offers - I'm not able to get the nuances of the discussion.

That said, based on the pictures, it really looks like a totally custom interface to the drives - not going to be easy using that space for anything other than the Sony-provided SSD drives.

Some other interesting points:

-Possible support for RAID 0+1?
-Proprietary SSD - non user-replaceable?
-Sounds like palm rest is plastic if FeliCa is selected. Maybe Aluminum if not

The Japanese for the paragraph is

-Fan has more fins, lower profile - should be more efficient *and* more quiet.
-No eSATA or USB3.0 because they had greater power requirements (separate power supply?)

-Peter

 

Arth1, that's the most optimistic you've sounded regarding the SSDs on the Z. That gives me warm fuzzies

Do you know if this also means we can choose alternate RAID configs like RAID5?

-Peter

 

Apart from the memory, it's better than the previous Z models, which is probably what matters.

 

My Z (with the config you see at the bottom of my post) had the following Win 7 Pro x64 index.

Processor: 6.4
RAM: 6.4
Graphics: 4.3
Gaming Graphics: 5.5
Primary HDD: 7.3

 

Yea I wonder why the memory is so low I got a 7.9 on my desktop i7, 5.9 seems really low.

 

A quick pic I made pointing the obvious:

 

ISW supports raid 0, 1, 01 (not 10) and 5, so I would say yes.

But keep in mind that it's not a real RAID controller, it's a small BIOS/EFI program that can add and remove drives to the array, and verify the integrity. The actual RAID operation is done by the OS, which must have isw support. Windows and newer versions of Linux do. OS-X, afaict, doesn't.

That said, RAID 5 will be pointless on the new Z for non-tech users because each drive is physically linked to another drive. So if a drive fails, you must replace two drives (unless you risk breaking the sandwich yourself), and then the RAID won't be able to restore anything, since the fault tolerance of RAID 5 is a single drive.
And it's damn certain that outsourced repair techs won't be able to identify and replace just the failed drive in a sandwiched pair, but will replace both (and likely reformat everything for you in the process).

RAID 01 (which Intel wrongly calls RAID 10), on the other hand, would make sense. You stripe two drives that are sandwiched together, and then mirror the two pairs. If one drive fails and you have to change the drive package, you still have the mirrored copy, and will continue to run normally.
With RAID 01, read speed is also the same as for a four drive RAID 0 -- the OS can read from all drives at the same time. Write speed is the same as for a 2-drive RAID 0.

The price is that you lose half the capacity, but that shouldn't be a problem unless you store videos on your laptop. (And if you do, get an external USB drive like a Passport -- it's more than fast enough to play back the video, which won't look any better from a faster drive.)

 

5.9 is the same as I get on my first generation Z-590 with PC3-8500 (1066 MHz) RAM.

 

And the QuadSSD gets 0.4 point less than Intel G2 160GB SSD in WEI if it matters

 

Interestingly enough, my Primary hard disk score is 7.9 with Intel X25-M G2 160GB on the "old" Z. I think one of the reasons would be better random write speeds of Intel SSDs, even without Raid.

 

Main difference seems to be that the test machine has 2x2GB = 4GB RAM and not 2x4GB = 8GB.
99% that is what makes the difference in the Experience index.

 

Looking at the specs of the 1.8" Samsung LIF SSDs, read is 90mb/s and write is 70mb/s and they are MLC (well obviously)

 

Yea something is not right there i7 has integrated memory controller, the score should be much higher.

 

Yea good point maybe it is not only based on performance but also size of the ram.

 

Interesting discussion. The pieces of the puzzle are falling into place. This would also mean we should be able to JBOD the drives, which would allow TRIM to work, correct? Assuming of course the drive firmware supports TRIM (which is the final big question in my mind).

 

I'd like to know what the X25E (SLC drive) scores. Pricewise, it's comparable to the Z's array at around $800.

But anyhow, there doesn't seem to be any way to get a 2.5" drive to fit in a new Z (apart from the Chinese model with no DVD), so it might be a moot point.

 

But those are sequential read/write speeds, not random ones.

 

Not just in China. You can configure it in Japan as well...that's what I would do...upgradeable HDD and no drive (= lower weight). Still it's step back from previous full pack Z.

And if I remember well, someone here upgraded his Z with X25E...but can't remember who was it... Anyway I don't believe there's much future for SLC drives in consumer devices...even Intel doesn't plan any refresh for their SLC series in the near future if I'm right.

 

You had me excited for a minute That is only 64GB SLC Intel though for 800 dollars. Too small for me.

 

You should[*] be able to disable the Intel raid function in the BIOS setup, which would make the drives separate by default, and also shave a few seconds off the boot (because it won't display the ISW information and wait for a potential CTRL-I).
And yes, if the drives support TRIM, it should then work just fine.

[*]: Unless someone with a propensity for crippling the BIOS setup has hidden that menu option, of course. In which case it's back to hacking

 

Keep in mind that the score is based on the lowest scoring component... so you'd need to know what scored 5.9.

 

I find that sad, most of all because of the reliability of SLC compared to MLC. A typical SLC drive is rated for 100,000 writes instead of 10,000, and 3 Mhours MTBF instead of 1.5.
And the random write speed is much better too.

Focusing on max sustained data transfer seems to me to be the wrong thing to do -- that's seldom where the bottleneck is. It's become like megapixels for cameras, or clock cycles for CPUs, in that it's a number that consumers can compare, but which in reality says little or nothing about how powerful the device really is.

I really wish the new Z had become more like the TT, with two 2.5" drive bays. An X25-E for a boot drive and a large HDD for storage of everything where read speed doesn't matter would be near ideal.

Ah well, perhaps in the next version of Z

 

Yeah, my thinking was that if a single drive failed, you'd have to shell out for a dual drive anyways - as long as I could clone the one good side, I could recover the entire array. But because of the proprietary connector, cloning the one good side might be a bit more difficult.

How about RAID 1 one pair of drives (boot drives), and RAID 0 the other pair (data drives). I think I could live with that compromise if it was supported.

-Peter

 

Well I can't say I don't agree with you. On the other hand though...new MLC drives are far better that their predecessors. I used to have 128GB Samsung drive before and even that was nice performer. With G2 Intel drive I don't miss anything. Personally, I wouldn't be able to exist with single 64GB drive, even 160GB is "just enough", if I don't want it to be filled too much. And in the World of SSD, where the nowadays drive is far far better than the one a year ago, I think it's better to switch for the newest type periodically...so no worries about number of writes I agree that 2 drives Z would be the best...maybe some custom creation with the Z without optical drive will be possible?