Portable One SSD Quality?

Hi, Im looking to customize and purchase a sony vaio z590 and im wondering how does Portable One's ssd option compare with the ssd option from sonystyle.com?

Portable one offers SSD V2 60 gb and 120 gb and Intel X25 80gb.

Sony offers 68 gb and 128 gb options.

 

And I noticed I have to pay a sales tax on sonystyle.com but no tax from portable one. Any idea?

 

The Intel and Sony (Samsung) are good choices, the 60GB (OCZ or Patriot) is not recommended because the Jmicron controller causing stuttering.

 

The ones from Sony, and the Intel x25 from PortableOne are good
Don't pick the OCZ Core V2.

I think the Intel is the fastest of all..

 

They did CONROE the SSD market so yes, they are the fastest of all and they use the cheapest memory.

 

Thanks.

Is there any other stores that offer customization on Vaio Z aside from PortableOne and SonyStyle?

And how come portableone charges no tax while sonystyle charges 8%+ tax lol? Quite a difference in final prices <_<

 

Where do you live?
I live in CA and Portable One charges me tax.

 

Taxes are based on areas of operation. Anywhere you carry and sell product in a physical location, you are subject to local, state, and federal taxes that pertain to your product. Sony sells their items both in retailers such as Best Buy as well as their own Sony Style stores in every state. So, you have to pay taxes based on your home location because Sony is accountable for that. Portable One, on the other hand, does business primarily electronically with only base of operations in California. So, only those who purchase with a California address have to pay taxes because only California purchases are accountable by Portable One for taxing purposes.

BBGus

 

A couple of ebay guys/stores I've seen offfering them.

 

I definitely would love to have the SSD option over a spinning drive. But an upgrade for 128g may just look a lil steep. Do you think 64g option would be sufficient for Vista Business with almost zero media (minimal music, no movies).

At what point (occupied storage %) would the operational speed of the harddrive slow down?

 

64GB will be more than enough if you disable system restore.

Over >80% has an impact on performance.

SSD's are really nice but I'm not sure it's worth the premium over a 320GB/7200rpm drive. Ok instead of booting Vista in 38 seconds, it may boot in 35 seconds.

 

but if you want to bun blue ray this won't be enough

 

I have installed an OCZ SSD V2 60GB on my Z21Vn, replacing 320GB 7200 HDD.
I can boot Vista x64 in 25 seconds (from Bios to Full GUI loaded)
Running HDtach I get read speed from a minimum of 70MB/s to a maximum of 170MB/s (average 100MB/s)
I'm satisfied at the moment, cause I have NO stuttering problems (just a second during the login screen when running on battery in stamina mode).

I'm going to upgrade to Windows 7, cause with this install I see my OS writing every second something to C:\$Logfile. I have disabled everything like prefetch, superfetch, readyboot, readyboost, pagefile
(I didn't noticed it with my previous Win 7 installation on this machine with "old" 320Gb drive)

Going back to SSD; I'm quite happy right now about speed.

I have latest firmware on my Vaio, and the SSD is the Version 2 from OCZ

 

It is possible to avoid a lot of the stuttering, still i think if you do some heavy multitasking you will notice it, like described in this review:
http://www.laptopmag.com/review/storage/intel-x25-m.aspx?page=1

 

I have installed Adobe Premiere CS4, I'll let you know if something happens when transcoding 1080p AVCHD files (huge CPU e disk usage)

 

Tried it, encoding 1080p avchd files to h.264.. Cpu gets 99%, while coping 3GB file within directories of the same SSD drive: No glitches, stuttering or some sort of slowdown.
The only strange thing is this "every-1-second-write" to the LogFile of the NTFS structure.. never noticed it in any pc before

 

Is there any other way to increase the laptop's HD space other than.. well the harddrive.

Im leaning toward the 64GB drive option. If I could get additional 16gb somewhere, that would be great. Are media cards any good for boosting HD space? I actually have never understood what the SD cards, express cards are used for lol.

 

You can use mediacards yes, but reading and writing to them is fairly slow in the Z. It also causes high CPU utilization. So it's far from ideal.

There is another way to increase HD space: upgrade to XP

 

I agree with PhilFlow.
And I can't understand why.
I can read/write on a Class 6 SDHC @ 5/MBs, when normally it can reach 15-23MB/s, and the CPU is @ 50% (on HT/dual core systems). Probably, the Ricoh driver doesn't use bus master/DMA access.
I'm quite sure about this, because when I use SDHC under Ubuntu, I can reach full speed without using huge CPU power..

 

There is more information about this available but I don't know where. TZ series suffers from the same problem.

 

Could you repeat the multitasking tests, like described here:
http://www.laptopmag.com/review/storage/intel-x25-m.aspx?page=4

Maybe the OCZ V2 in combination with Z is really unaffected by the problems. It would be nice to know.