So I am thinking about getting a Z...

I am still debating about whether or not to get myself a Z. Here's some alternatives I am looking at:

Lenovo X201
Macbook Pro 13"
Asus U30jc

And this is the Z model I have my eyes on:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicat...3&sku=S170-13105&srkey=Sony VAIO VPCZ112GX/S#

The sony laptop seems to offer just about everything I wanted: speed, weight, build, battery life. Though I still have some questions about it.

By default (see link), what SSD does it include? Does it support TRIM and at least as fast as fast and problem free as the Intel SSD?

I also notice there's option to fit 2 harddrives. Is it possible to a 2.5" old school mechanical drive for storage next to SSD boot drive? If not, maybe 1.8"?

How's the build on this thing compare to unibody MBP?

Lastly, I notice it doesn't support Optimus and there's some screen flickering when switching screen. How bad is the problem and does Sony version of Optimus work just as well?

 

You should really read the forums for more info, but the Z is very different to all of the above laptops.

The Z is quite a feet. It has a full notebook processor, but in an ultra small and light body. It is 500grams lighter then the macbook 13" but has similar internals to the macbook pro 15". As you could guess some trade offers were made. It doesn't feel as tough, but I believe it has a nicer look to the macbooks (I have always liked that VAIO design, so everyone for there own).

Read the forums regarding the HDD's because there is a ton of information.

Optimus is still a work in progress, but no one really knows as yet.

 

One question about your alternatives.

for the MBP... It doesn't have any of the things you asked about the Z so why would you even include that in your list? Other than it being a 13" laptop there really is no comparison. I had actually sold my old laptop to wait for the refresh of the MBP but after I saw it's specs it was out of the picture

 

MBP13 has good build and relatively light when compare to other 13" (not the premium ones ofc). I have not read any reviews yet, but I suppose it's battery can last, as this is what MBP is famous for, which doesn't need Optimus to save energy. I probably won't even both with SSD since OS X doesn't support TRIM.

 

The only thing I dislike about my Z is the build quality. From the moment Picked it up for the first time the left palm rest has poppped in and out of the rest of the body. it's very slight, but it's annoying enough considering what I paid for it.

It's a pretty fragile beast of a laptop, but I tend to take really good care of my stuff, so it's not that big of a deal. I love my Z a lot, but I do wish it was built better.

 

I never heard of that before....at least not for my Z.

 

One thing I can say is get the 192GB, 384 or 512GB SSD option, instead of getting the intel SSD. As those options are 3 triple and quad raid and should be faster than the intel and MBP.
No trim YET, I think it will come, but some kind of background garbage collection seems to be making this a non-issue.
I say skip the HDD and get the SSD.

 

The Intel would still be much faster for small random read/writes, which is why I would prefer the Intel SSD in most cases. Sony's Samsung SSDs in RAID are still pretty good, though.

 

After reading about optimus and TRIM, it seems that optimus doesn't really work without side effects, and TRIM doesn't work in raid period.

Optimus isn't a big deal since I can just push it on and off. And IIRC the auto doesn't switch graphics for you when you enter graphic heavy applications. Is it possible to run HD videos (bluray for example) smoothly without enabling 330m?

As for the TRIM not working in RAID, is it possible to unraid the drives and then link them together into a single drive but without RAID 0 config?

 

Is there a way to make other hard drives fit inside Z though? I thought it uses special form factor. My guess is a machanical storage drive doesn't fit into the tiny room it has.

What kind of garbage collector are you talking about? Does it work to a point that minimize the speed lost? If it does, I don't really mind the difference between it and TRIM and kudos to Sony making in house softwares that actually work (unlink the complete junks come with other pc OEM).

 

Yeah, Sony's proprietary design would likely restrict you to using the stock hardware. I'm not entirely certain, though.

 

In the sense that there is some process going on when the notebook is idle, that prevents performance degradation, even with the look of trim.
Thats why its not an issue.

I would not break the raid, as some people have reported having issues, just leave it like it is and enjoy the performance. But do get a triple raid: 192 or 382GB drive or thr quad: 512GB for extra speed.

 

256GB also comes in quad (4x64GB). Not sure it's available in the US.

 

Nope, in the US its dual.

You lucky Europeans with your FullHD option and quad SSD 256GB and your cool accents

 

But they also seem to be paying quite a bit more for a similar spec model.

 

I just ran a Random 4K Read / Write (Q32) test in CDM and I have 97MB/s and 57MB/s, read and write respectively. I have a quad SSD config. I believe that is faster that what Intel is offering. However I will maintain that all this says is that I can run this benchmark faster and nothing more.

I don't think you will find many people who have this notebook with 4x SSD that are complaining about disk performance.

There is no other notebook out right now that will match this for disk performance. I would not let disk performance hold you up if that is of concern.

 

Ultimately, I won't deny that the SSDs in the Z are rather good ones, and definitely shouldn't stop you buying the Z, whether it's a configuration with 2, 3, or 4 SSDs. I would be interested in seeing a detailed comparison of the overall user experience between the RAID SSD configs and another laptop with a single Intel drive, though. I suspect that overall there wouldn't be much difference between all of the options, and if I was choosing my own SSD configuration I'd likely go with the lowest-cost solution using high-quality SSDs.

 

FYI

A not-so-direct comparison with an Intel X25-M

http://forum.novatech.co.uk/showpost.php?p=259517&postcount=16

 

Here's a post explaining what QD (Queue Depth) means for SSDs.

Intel's SSDs are pretty amazing, it seems.

 

The problem for putting different ssd's in not a size is but a connector issue the Sony/samsung ssd's just don't have cassing so the take less space but you can take the case off of intel ssd's and your good on space but the zif connector is a problem there is a thread on a few people trying to figure it out though

 

Thanks for the link.

 

I'd take 2*128 GB over 4*64 GB any day.
Not only will the fault rate be much lower for a 2-drive stripe than a 4-drive one, but you can also break the RAID and have a non-striped boot drive that's big enough to use, and which supports TRIM.

Speed? Raw max speed and averages are only important in DSWs. In real use, what matters is if the worst case speed is fast enough for the job you do.

 

I am totally with you. I think all of us wish we had Intel drives instead of Samsung. 4x64 X-25M would be really cool.

That's the thing too. Are we all just looking at benchmarks and saying x is faster than y? If so then fine. But really... Do we really think there is a "noticeable" difference for even the above average user? I mean anyone that is coming from the 5400 and 7200 RPM drives in our notebooks compared to even a Gen 1 SSD is going to notice thinks are considerable quicker. SSD technology at this point is just in its infancy. It sort of reminds me of the Voodoo series graphics cards vs. Nvidia when the wars waged between OpenGL and DirectX and who trumps who.

 

When you say a 2 drive stripe are you talking RAID 0 or RAID 1 with 2 x 128?

 

Stripe = RAID 0
Mirror = RAID 1

Unfortunately, the new Z only allows stripes, not mirrors, due to an artificial limitation/crippling by Sony.
EU 256 GB model = 4*64 GB stripe
US 256 GB model = 2*128 GB stripe

If you break the RAID, you get four individual 64 GB drives in the EU, but two individual 128 GB drives in the US. The latter is much more useful, IMO.

 

It wouldn't fit.
2x X18-M (+ 1x X25-E if forgoing the CD) would have been doable, if Sony hadn't made the drive assembly and connectors proprietary.

 

So is there any noticeable problem with the the RAID 0 drives even though TRIM is not in effect? Minor speed does not concern me. I had couple MLC pre intel SSD before with those horrific Jmicron controller. Although in benchmarks they run significantly faster than 7200rpm drives, in real application they suffer major stutter making them slower than even my 5 years old 5400rpm drive due to problems with random write. I hope the lack of TRIM doesn't contribute to the problems similar to my past SSDs.

From what I know so far, TRIM cleans the rewritable blocks from the drive, thus saving the trouble of having the drive checking whether or not a block can be overriden. How exactly does this software running in the background do? Can someone confirm that it works well enough to avoid problems in the long run?

 

Correct. No prob with Raid 0 with speed and slow down.
Nobody truly know how it works. But from test I have seen forum members fill there VAIO Z with tons of files, delete it and see a slight performance slowdown. After leaving the laptop idle, and running the benchmark again performance was back up.

 

I'd take 2 x 128 GB as well, but I can't... I have 4 x 64 GB configuration and because of idiocy in Z11's BIOS I cannot add one more SSD for OS/boot because the CPU power management will be non-operational.

4 x SSD does have some minimal advantage in typical desktop workloads - not too many desktop applications would benefit from those high sequential I/O anyway (unless you copy bunch of DVD ISOs every day). Even OS itself won't boot faster... heck, since those old Samsung SLC drives my boot times are all within ~1 second...

By the way, most OEMs anyway use Samsung SSDs for years (Sony was using them since they started offering SSDs) - Samsung drives are not the fastest ones on the market but they are very reliable and probably cheap for the OEM and they also have garbage collection for preventing serious performance degradation (at least all new Samsung SSDs do). So far I haven't got a a single issue with Samsung SSDs (I have 1nd gen SLC, 2nd gen SLC, 1nd gen MLC and latest MLC in Z) - I'd gladly use X25-E instead Sammy for boot/App drive, but I am not unhappy with Sammy MLC, either...

I wouldn't take anything else than Intel or Samsung for a SSD anyway. Maybe some of those new SF-1500 drives but only after market tests them and they prove reliable

 

That is not technically correct. A "stripe" is not RAID 0. "Stripe" alone means very little. Striping is a segmentation of data across devices. This could be volumes or disks. RAID 5 is striping... striping with parity. With mirroring you are not segmenting any data. Technically that is not striping.

But that was my point... If you did a 2-drive stripe as you say, this is not mirroring. There is no way to "break the stripe" (break the mirror) because the data is segmented (not mirrored).

You mention that you would rather take 2*128 and mirror them for reliability over a 4*64. With a 4*64 you could to RAID 10 and get up to 4x the performance and even better reliability (MTBF). You get the same usable disk space and can still "break the mirror".

I understand that little of this matters with the Z considering it has only one RAID level however some of the terminology around RAID, stripes and failure rates is not an accurate representation of how things work.

If there are other SAN Architects that care to chime in feel free...

 

That's exactly what it is. RAID 0 isn't really RAID -- it's just a stripe. Any plain stripe over multiple disks can technically be called a RAID 0.
I prefer to call a spade a spade, and a stripe a stripe.

Normally, one would call RAID 5 a RAID, and not a stripe, because it has Redundancy, unlike plain stripes.

Correct. Which is why no-one would ever call a RAID 1 a stripe. It isn't (even though it uses striping for read operations).

You break the stripe by removing the isw markers from the disk, either by removing it from the Intel Software Raid screen, by a 3rd party utility (like mdadm or dmraid), or simply by overwriting the data. After breaking it, it will no longer be assembled.

Of course you'll lose all the data on the disks (unless you jump through hoops to get it back, in which case you might as well just have made a copy beforehand) -- that's implicit to breaking a plain stripe.

Look at earlier discussions about this here. I was one of the proponents of doing exactly that -- until it surfaced that Sony has crippled the Intel firmware so it can't do RAID 1, 5, 01 (Intel Software Raid doesn't do RAID 10, only 01), nor spares. Only RAID 0.

Of course, one could always forgo the Intel raid altogether and use a plain software RAID 10. But then one would need to place the boot partition on a non-striped partition (and for redundancy, install the boot loader four times, once for each drive, with it being configured as the boot drive. Repeat for every kernel upgrade. Tedious.)

 

If i order a preconfigurated setup, does it come with a disk for clean reinstall of windows? It doesnt really matter since i have another copy of windows 7 pro already but i want to make sure i can get back that janitor program and other essential drivers if i reinstall using a stand alone copy of windows

 

You need to add more to it than just "stripe". You are talking about data striping. There is several terms in storage that use the word stripe.

A stripe over multiple disks IS RAID 0 if that is all it is. A stripe over multiple disks with parity is RAID 5. It is not technically RAID 0, it is technically RAID 5. Call it RAID 0 with parity if you want but it is RAID 5.

There is no such thing as a "plain stripe". RAID 5 is striped. It is striped with parity.

We don't call RAID 1 data striping because it is called data mirroring. Data striping and data mirroring are not the same. Data is not segmented in a mirror, that is what data striping is. A mirror is exactly that... a mirror copy. It does not use "striping" for a read operation. Data is not changed dynamically from being mirrored to being stripped. What you are trying to describe (striping for read operations) is something called a split seek.

RAID 0 the data is stripped.
RAID 1 the data is mirrored.
RAID 5 the data is stripped with parity.

There is a difference.

 

Working for a generation as a Unix sysadmin, I believe I know more than most about both striping drives, and the difference between striping, mirroring, RAID levels, plaid RAID, you name it.
Even stripping, which does make a difference, you're quite right about that.

When anyone says striping without qualifying it further, plain striping without parity, AKA RAID 0, is implied. Just like if someone says ATA without qualifying it further, PATA is implied, not SATA, ATA over Ethernet or other varieties which technically are ATA.

And in this context, with the Z being delivered with RAID 0, and all other soft raids being disabled in the firmware, it should be abundantly clear that "striping" referred to RAID 0, and not anything else.

My apologies that I wasn't clear enough. The next time I say "hard drive", I'll make sure to make it perfectly clear that I mean a spinning storage device including its rotating platters, and not just the motor in it, an SSD, nor the Paris-Dakar rally.

 

if what you say is true then you probably have forgotten more about UNIX than I will ever learn.

You changed context when you talked about doing a 2x128 mirror which is out of context for the Z and and proceeded to qualify every post I made on the subject regarding mirroring compared to stripping.

I am sure that if someone was here up in arms about how their hard drive isn't working with TRIM on their new Z you would probably qualify what they were saying as well. I just did the same when you pushed the issue. I thought we were about to get into stripe sizes, widths and elements in the next few posts.

Let's not get bent out of shape about this...

BTW... plaid RAID... defiantly not something I hear used very often. You must be or have run a some massive databases with some serious SLAs. I do not run into designs that call for it very often as everyone is all about doing AMS on "SAME" or I can usually work around it by using multiple striped metas (VDEV, LUSE and even micro sparing). Even harder is finding storage admins who can deal with it let alone understand it. So cheers for that one.

 

Sounds like you went through exactly what I did with early SSD's. I literally have a box of them, because I kept wanting them to work, so would buy a new one every few months.

Anyway; I have an X25-M and a lot of experience with it. Is the Vaio faster numerically? I don't know... but subjectively it flies. It's a very very fast machine.

I have a 1.4GB Cached outlook mailbox and it can do any search in a couple of seconds. Moving huge blobs of data around is amazingly quick. It clearly has some kind of TRIM-ish behavior going on.

 

I have done a comparison among the Sony SSD RAID and other SSDs.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=6168423&postcount=3849

Iometer confirms the results. AS-SSD even ranks the X25-M higher than the Quad SSD RAID!!

 

Non sequitur -- your conclusion does not follow from the premise.
The first operation is read only, which isn't affected by saturation and write amplification at all.
The second operation is a combination of reads - which are completed unaffected - and large writes, which are very little affected. (A 512 kB write experiences the same absolute penalty as a 4 kB write, but relative to the size written, it's much smaller.)

It's small random writes that take a big penalty from lack of TRIM. Like inserts in databases with lots of values, or rapid creation and syncing of small files.

Web browsing is a good example of operations that can be slowed down, to the point that the user experiences stalls. Especially with Firefox, which stores the cached data in round-robin hashed containers, and the browsing data in an sqlite database.

 

For those thinking about the X201 as a Z alternative, the X201 with i7 is onsale for 48 hours for $995 at Lenovo. Make sure you switch from the 2x2gb stick option to 1x4gb to free up a memory slot. It costs the same regardless.

 

Where do you see $995? I see $1249. Is that with some coupon or something?

 

Goto Lenovo - IBM Shareholder Purchase Program.

Make an acct if needed.

Use coupon "USXTHINKX201".

I'm so mad at myself for missing the X201s for $825 today. I've been waiting for that for months. It was 60% off. It's even a current model. All planes should have wifi.