So my SA's 512gb SSD failed..... :(

Just a friendly piece of advice to prospective buyers:

Listen to the people on here that say not to buy Sony's SSD's. Mine failed today. I stupidly hadn't backed up for a few months so I lost a lot of files. Pretty disappointing for a $1000 hard drive. Luckily it's still under warranty; but if you get a SSD looking to improve reliability or reduce thermal output, I'd look elsewhere. The computer is only 8 months old. Apparently one side of the Raid 0 linked drives failed which means the whole thing is toast; running bios revealed that the hard disk ports 1 and 2 were not being recognized at all. The computer would not boot and simply gave me a black screen with the word "Operating System Not Found".

Also, don't try to use Sony's chat tech support, just call them. I'm pretty sure the chat is automated and it seemed to get mysteriously disconnected every time we got to the point that the laptop was actually broken. After I finally called and had a conversation with an Indian sounding fellow with a very thick accent, they finally agreed to send someone to my house to look at the laptop, which I found odd. I was expecting for them to have me ship the laptop to them for repair.

Either way, the moral of the story is that Sony's SSD's just aren't worth the price right now, in my experience. I bought mine from Sony because I didn't want the hassle of installing windows and hardware drivers myself, which was a mistake in retrospect.

If I had to guess what caused the failure I'd say thermal issues....the laptop runs very hot when gaming and it was common for it to shut down after 30 minutes or so.

 

Just curious, but what brand of SSDs is used in the model that you have?

 

Sony doesn't make SSD's. They use Samsung and Toshiba. Like anything else, stuff breaks sometimes. I've had pretty bad luck personally with SSD's in general, have had Intel, OCZ, and others fail. But never has an SSD failed in any of my Sony laptops.

 

I saw people talking about Sony using Toshiba ssd's for std setup. Might be a clue there.

 

The SSD's in my SA are OEM'd by Samsung.

 

^ this, just because one ssd fails, you shouldn't blame Sony and I guess you learned that making occasional backups are paramount ESPECIALLY when you're running Raid0...

edit: post from Pyr0 how to make some good backups on RAID0'ed systems:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sony/512180-how-make-full-backup-your-vaio-z.html#post6625769

it's for the Vaio Z1, but it should work for you too

 

Hi,
Sorry to hear of your problems - what a pain it is when things go wrong & most frustrating the lack of support.
However, I have 3 Laptops, 2 being Sony with SSD RAID & 1 being over 2 yrs old & is fine - the performance of the oldest is still bristering & quicker than any standard HDD rig.
I know drives can fail, as before SSD's - the 'old' spinning drives used to fail quite often.
I am a fan of SSD' & would not go back to a noisy, slower & more power consuming HDD.
- But, your point is taken,
Cheers,
t

 

GUYS! I Know the drive is not made by Sony. That was pretty obvious from the samsung stickers all over the drives. However, Sony did sell them to me and it came installed in their computer. So if you guys would spare me the SONY DIDN'T MAKE THEM!!!11!!! lectures, I'd appreciate it. It's like saying McDonalds isn't responsible for their hamburger meat because farmer joe's beef ranch supplied the patties.

 

Really? Then what was the first post all about, then?

A better example would be:

Best Buys is not responsible the technical failure of a Samsung SSD purchased from them, even though they are oblidged to replace it within a set period of time.

 

Actually you said specifically "don't buy sony ssd's". Regardless, stuff breaks. Just because your drive broke (which is mfr'd by a top mfr) doesn't mean they should be avoided. Who's the one handing out lectures here? (hint: it's you).

 

I'd be embarrassed too if I didn't have a backup plan in place but I don't think I'd be telling everyone about my lack of competence.

 

How dare someone express disappointment when a product he's spent a ton of money on fails

 

Expressing disappointment and suggesting a boycott based on misinformation and a single failure are two different things. But thanks for joining the convo.

 

Open up the bottom panel and remove and refit the cables from the SSD array to the motherboard. And press on the cables on the SSD side to ensure they have a good connection. Maybe on of the cables came loose.

 

No problems with he SSD's in my Z. Can't fault them at all.

The VAIO SA is a piece of junk. It's the worst laptop Sony have shipped for a long time. The screen is abysmal and due to the inadequate ventilation for that type of CPU, those annoying fans kick in far too regularly to desperately try & cool the machine down.

I was always amazed with the reviews of the VAIO SA. Clearly all those who reviewed the machine were too scared to upset Sony with an honest review. It's 3/10 tops. Absolute crap.

 

The learning moment here should be to buy your laptop with the least expensive platter drive, then buy your own SSD and change it out yourself. It will be cheaper and you'll have the ability to choose what you want. Over two years ago I bought my F through Sony with a Toshiba SSD. Not a bad drive with little to no performance losses, but no question buy separately and install yourself.

 

UPDATE: VAIO customer support is abysmal. After getting their "tech support" to schedule an on-site repair, I got a call from what is presumably their 3rd party contractor. He said I had to be available for him to show up at my house within 48 hours of his call or I'd have to go through the whole process again. As luck would have it I was on a 10 day business trip. So back to square 1. Fantastic.

Next I call sony back to get a new reference number. This time they refuse to give me an on-site repair because they insist there is a Sony Store within a few miles. I say "I don't think so, but ok let me try to find out"....turns out the store closed down several months ago and no longer exists. Back to square 1 again......

I deeply regret spending the money on this laptop now. Future customers: please look elsewhere before wasting money on a Vaio.

Okay, I guess you're a Sony Fanboi, I'm sure they can do no wrong in your eyes. Do me a favor and don't respond to this thread anymore. You're not helpful at all.

 

I've had a few VAIO's over the years and they've never failed on me. In fact I bought my parents & brother a VAIO and they've never had a single issue either.

My current Z has 3 x SSDs (RAID 0) and has been solid for nearly 2 years.

I'd say you were just unlucky & your situation does not reflect the entire brand.

 

Me 2....
I have many SSD's & never had any failures. Previously I had spinning HDD's and suffered failures.
My view (to date) is SSD's are far more reliable.
Cheers,
t

 

I'm no "Fanboi". What help were you looking for exactly? All I read was a rant. If you have some actual questions, the nice members of this community (myself included) are here to provide answers.

 

The VPCCW was a much worse machine so your second statement is clearly false to anyone who have used both machines (the VPCCW isn't by far the worst notebook I've used either).
No cooling problems here. No screen problems except that it has limited view angles which seems to be common on smaller screens.

Or you just was unlucky and got a bad machine? The only thing I'd really complain about is the insensitive ALPS touchpad...
Stress testing long periods using furmark with GPU overclocking doesn't overheat and while the fans are running loud they aren't a problem if gaming with headphones.

 

I don't own the SA, I have a Z. But I have used the SA and some friends own the SA and it's a festering turd of a machine.

The fans & noise the machine can make under stress are totally inappropriate in an office environment. Maybe if Sony had better engineered the machine it wouldn't need such frantic cooling. Otherwise it's a very nice looking machine.

Shame about that appalling screen though...

 

Boy, you said it Steve. That's what I get for buying a $3,000 laptop sight unseen I guess. Really really loud fan, and mine at least overheats to the point of shutdown after an hour of playing something like Modern Warfare 3, although sometimes it shuts down in as little as 30 minutes. Plus my screen came with a "stuck pixel" which is always red on a dark screen in the bottom left. How does that slip by "quality control"? (and yes I've tried all the techniques to unstick it). Battery life is maaaybe an hour when playing a game and about 3 hours when just listening to music or running a word processor/web browser. Whether the SS drive failing was the fault of Samsung of Sony, there's no way at all I'd recommend this laptop.

I remained quiet about most of the above issues until the $1000 hard drive Sony sold me quit after just 9 months; that was the last straw. Perhaps I'll insist that they fix the stuck pixel too since I'm already having warranty work done.

 

Seriously, comparing the S series to the Z series... I wonder how low are we going to get before admitting at 1000usd, there is no real competition to the Vaio SA, and at 2000usd (for ultraportables), there still is no competition... period, to the Vaio Z2? Yes, the Vaio SA sucks if you wanted a Z1 replacement, but it's a SA, not a Z1++, lol. Products change over time, that's all there is to it.



Personally, on another level, I do think Sony's build quality is about as good as it was 10 years ago.


That is to say, still utter junk.

 

I had so many visceral reactions as I read through the thread that it inspired me to do a "mass response." As usual, if you are not fond of my brand of contribution, feel free to skip past it with my apologies for the finger tap I made you waste. I will take most/all of it down in a short while. To me this thread is a kind of Best Of and Worst Of the NBR experience. (I make no claim to have superior wisdom, this is just how I took it in.)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is what I think the OP boiled down to:

M y $1,000 SSD failed today and I am sooooo pissed! (Also mad at myself because I was neglectful of backups.) I wanna hurt whoever I can find to blame this on!

My reaction to his post is found at the end of this post. Here are my reactions to many other posts:

@CT: What a nice and classy way to frame your post. (Obvious that you're not American!) This guy wants sympathy and the right to scream; he's not really trying to get people to boycott Sony laptops with OEM SSDs - or at least I hope not. He's just really, really mad.

But that's just plain mean. Did the OP offend you personally with his rant? Have you ever ranted when something went wrong and you were complicit in the damage?

What he said.

What he said.

Gold stars and +1 for being the only one to actually offer potentially useful advice! Not that the OP asked for help, but, as Beaups pointed out, he should have. People on this forum are not generally very sympathetic. Thus getting advice and help is the main value of NBR. You can get much more sympathy from your FB friends.

Someone (other than the OP) needed to say it, all of it. That said,

The second, of 2, out of 24 posts and counting, that offers useful consideration. All but the Z owners are very well advised to do this. Z owners can't. It's one of the scary things about owning a Z: tons of treasure to buy, beholden to proprietary SSD configuration, with no HDD option and no place to put an aftermarket SSD of your choosing. You have to buy-in to the concept, and have a lot of trust, and a lot of cash, and a good back-up system!

Alert the media - this is news! (just kidding ).

@Steve: I love the way put it and I will steal the line (not just for the SA, but for anything that's a big fail.) But you don't get to pan the same machine for the same reasons twice in the same thread.

Actually, I think the SA is a misunderstood and poorly marketed laptop. It represents an unnusual combination of very good (fast, light, great looking, great backlit KBcheap in a base or base+ configuration,) and very bad (screen, noise and cost, if you buy all the options from Sony. Note that in base config. it's got way, way more pros than cons - according to me! It's a great laptop to use with an external monitor in the office, and it's virtues really shine on the road, where one seldom needs a great screen. Other than the screen, it pretty much fills the role of the Z1, but faster and for a lot less $$ - at Christmas you could get a very useful config. for $799.

See also: jeremy shaw's excellent post (just above^) describing (accurately) the same laptop we all love to pan (primarily for it's rot-gut rotten cheapo WalMart reject screen, lol) as the best deal going for its price - and, unlike the rest of us, he owns one.

Maybe the truest words of the thread.

@LSW: you will get more compassion if you are a little less vitriolic, though I don't deny that can be therapeutic when your $3,000 laptop has become a paperweight. Still you are under warranty and you did make the decisions you did and, you know what? This too shall pass. Think of how great it is that you are fortunate enough to have $3,000 to spend on a laptop. Do whatever you do to chill out. Don't want to kill Sony or yourself. Shirt happens.

 

I'm a happy and satisfied Vaio customer. I have recommended VAIOs to other people who became happy and satisifed Vaio owners.

Since the OP sees fit to advise future customers to avoid Vaio based on their *single* poor experience, I have no trouble based on more extensive experience advising Future Customers to strongly consider VAIO.

 

Methinks I hear this "dead horse" beg (from horsey heaven): "Please, stop flagging me!

 

So today I finally get the Sony on-site service contractor to show up to my place with a replacement Hard Drive. Keep in mind I'm expected to basically be "on-call" for this guy for 2-4 days after calling sony and be ready for him to show up any time....great.

So he gets there with the replacement, and I briefly describe the problem with the SSD to which he replies,

Repairman: "oh, it's a solid state?"

Me: "uhhh, yeah."

Repairman: "well they just gave me a standard 512gb HDD SATA drive"

Me: "I'm going on a 30 day overseas business trip starting tomorrow"

Repairman: "well you better call sony and start over with a new work order".

 

As it was urgent, couldn't you have just accepted that so the machine was usable & then argue with Sony about getting it replaced with a SSD when you are back from your trip?

 

That's awful. At any rate, have you checked the cable connections as described earlier? Since you have 2 logical drives failed, it seems a loose connector could be an obvious culprit considering they are arranged as 2 drivers per connector.

 

The first day it happened took it to a local repair shop to check the connections and give me a diagnosis for $20; they told me the hard drive was just bad. I watched what they did, they took the whole hard drive out and put it back in to see if anything would happen; it didn't help.

Not having the laptop for the trip isn't a big deal, since I still have my old Sager. Luckily that laptop still had 99% of the data that my SA did since I'd only had the SA a few months. The bigger issue is waiting another month to get it fixed.

 

Not that this helps you now, but if you have an extended wtty, or are planning to get one, I'd dump the Sony (I think you can get a prorated refund) and get a Square Trade wtty. They get it fixed right in 5 business days or you get your original price paid. No need to deal with Sony service any longer than you have to.

Good luck.

 

^ do you have any personal experience with them? i'm contemplating getting a 3-year warranty from them.

 

Yes, just one. They performed flawlessly, sending me a box to send my laptop to for repair, asking me to list all issues, they received it in 2 days and called me to confirm just what was wrong, called me 2 days later to offer to repair or "total" (like a wrecked car) the computer. I chose the latter and had a check for $1,499 2 days later.

I have 5 ST wttys on: laptops, cameras, iPhones. Great to deal with, win all top awards from JD Power and others for consumer satisfaction. I hope I don't advise you and you become one of the first "victims" if they change their customer friendly policies! They are doing so well running the business as they do, I doubt they'd mess with success.

BTW, do ALL your business with them by phone, including purchase of your coverage. You always get a better deal over the phone and, if you have a product in service, you really want to speak to the tech responsible for the repair.

As compared to Sony's repair service and ADH administration, well, one is an honest commitment to fulfill the obligations of a contract and the other is, well, a piece of paper that may as well say: "We are Sony so we can do whatever we want. If you don't have an ADH wtty, we will always say the problem with your computer is due to "owner abuse." If you have ADH coverage, we will find a way to deny you a replacement!" Also, if you read Sony's warranties, they subtract any service they've performed under wtty for a given product and, if you need to send it back for additional work, they will only provide service the value of which is less than the original purchase price minus the value of warranty service already provided. If that sounds unthinkable to you, you've got it right! If your $1,200 SE needs a replacement screen, Sony will replace it, and then will only cover, say, $700 of additional repairs through the end of the warranty. If the next time, the cost of repairs is over $700, they will only provide the $700 and then offer to do the rest as out of warranty repair. Truly! Under the same circumstance Square trade would replace the screen and then either perform the additional repairs under warranty, or pay you the full amount of your purchase price in satisfaction of their warranty obligations.

Sorry for such a long explanation, but check it out and see if the scenario I laid out has not been experienced to the chagrin of those who purchased Sony's extended/ADJ warranties.

 

^ thanks for the info. yeah, i have read the SONY extended warranty stories here on this forum, that's why i decided to go with SquareTrade. just wanted to know your personal opinion.

 

Well trolled

Given the sheer abysmalness of Sony service, the only reason I still buy them - well, the flagships at least - is the reasonable (and so far, post-'10, justified) expectation that they don't need the warranty.

And of course as ever, I'm not speaking from experience of just the one unit bought every three years

 

I think I have, so far, bought two of every laptop I've bought myself. The first always broke in some way.


Dell C840 then D820 - one's audio controller cut out, then the PCMCIA card slots, so replaced it with the then current D820. That overheated and died promptly.

Dell M1210. GPU killed the first one. Got the Intel GMA 950 version after that.

Acer 4810TZ - broken KB, twice, then broken power button. So got another alltogether instead of dealing with more replacement parts.

m11xR1 & R2 - broken hinge (on both models), dead battery (R2), and horrid build quality (again, both).

Vaio SA - paint wear and horrid KB backlight evenness - 80% of the light was on the right side (kk, those were more of an OCD issue...).




The day I find a laptop that I didn't have to buy twice... I'll be happy forever. Then again, I also ask for them to be brisk and light, since I do travel a fair bit...

The other possibility is, I am horrid at buying laptops, and whatever I buy, avoid.

 

Prudent advice. Howver, just to be safe, if I give you a heads-up before buying my next computer, will you please buy something else?

 

Heh. But who else to bother you with all the whining?

 

@LoneStarWings did you actually update to the new BIOS version
R2085H4 ? This should fix some SSD issues:

Just saying, becuase the error it shows to you does not look like a failed ssd to me.

 

I didn't go out of my way to update the BIOS; I always download updates from Sony if the Vaio prompts me too, though...so if I wasn't prompted to do it I didn't. Can you update the BIOS without going into windows?

 

There is but in your situation, the best and safest way would be to put a mini windows or PE on a flash drive and do the update there. Search the internet for hiren's bootcd, it brings everything you need.

 

So I FINALLY got my computer back from Sony. Eventually I had to send it in for their "depot service", after no less than 3 (yeah THREE!) failed attempts to send someone to my apartment to repair it. It came back yesterday.

Guess what? I only show 222 GB of memory on my C drive! If you'll remember, the laptop was ordered with and came with a 512 GB SSD. ! Should I call Sony and demand a refund for the extra $500 I paid for a 512 GB SSD? I specifically sent them my original receipt for the laptop which specified a 512GB SSD and even wrote them a note on the repair card that I have a 512 GB SSD!!!!!!!

I'm really getting tired of Sony's games. I know I just sound like a whiner to most of you, but I'm past the point of anger. I'm now just downright depressed that someone would treat a customer this way, like absolute _____ . I shelled out over $3K for what I thought would be a very nice laptop but is in reality a total TURD. There's a sucker born every minute, I guess.

Please someone tell me I'm wrong and that there's some way I'm incorrectly reading the screen when I click on "computer', then see 128 GB free of 222 GB under the "Windows (C: )" graphic! I am not a computer guru, so I could be missing something, but it certainly smells fishy and I just want to get what I paid for.

BIOS says:

Hard Drive 1: None
Hard Drive 2: None
Hard Drive 3: 128
Hard Drive 4: 128

O

 

They stole you a 2x128GB SSD module. Or they did not properly connect it.