Sony SA Series Discussion Sony's next new 13.3 laptop

what is Discrete GPU (AMD Whistler-XT with 1 GB VRAM)?

 

6730M or 6770M

 

It sounds good. One questions is how good is really display. I'd be very keen to replace my Z11 with SA as long as display is same quality.

It's a shame they make it larger than current Z, and I can see the point, that they tried to fit everything inside (although Z has same Bill Of Material and it's smaller) so the edges around screen makes it look like 1990s laptop, but in this case they could easily fit in 14.1 screen which @1600x900 comes to 130PPI (very comfortable on your eyes). Same display they use in EA.
D

 

That display is again disappointing. I was really hoping for a premium display, it's why I didn't go with the SB...waiting for this and hemming and hawing over other models. I hope this also comes in the same colors as the SB not just black and silver. Sony really doesn't seem to be offering as high of specs on many offering in Canada lately.

 

If the SA doesn't come fitted with Display Plus at least, I'll be disappointed. I really wanted to get the VPC-Z, but decided to wait for Sandy Bridge CPUs to come out, so not having a display about as good as the one on the Z would be disappointing. Hmm, I wonder if I can fit one of those new 14.1" LG blade displays and simply cut off the SA's bezel...

On a related note, I was looking around trying to choose which SSD to put into my SA (if/when I get it) and I came across a startling reliability report from the guys at Coding Horror, published on 2 May 2011.

I know the drives in that post are old generation models, but it is a little worrying how high the failure rate is on them. I have seen independent industry tests that show failure rates between 0.5% and 2.5% (with Intel drives breaking the least), but nothing quite like this. It also makes me wonder if the safe option of the Samsung 470s that are used by OEMs are going to be much more reliable than a Crucial M4 or OCZ Vertex 3. I'd like to get the Vertex, but I'm worried due to Vertex 1 and 2 reliability and compatibility. Oh, and those pesky drivers... From what I hear there's been no issues with the new Sandforce SF-2281 controller so far other than higher power consumption than the old SF-1200 series.

Luckily, though, from what I see, manufacturers will happily replace your drive if it fails, and data stored on it does remain readable.

Have any of you guys had any trouble with your SSD drives? I'd be nice to get a cross-section of people here on this forum to share their experiences, knowing many of you have upgraded your drives.

ak-xs, I'd like to hear what you have to say on this...

 

I cannot comment personally on the OCZ or Cruical drives but i've been using SSD's in my laptops since 2008 and i'll never use a laptop with a mechanical drive again. I've had no issues with any of my drives apart from the time i possibly caused an issue myself trying to set up RAID in one of my laptops.
I own/have owned 3 SSD's with a Samsung controller. I have also purchased 2 Photofast SSD's and a Kingston V +100 drive.
I couldn't be happier with all of them.

I really would suggest before you buy do some research and stay away from drives that have been reported with any issues, and seek out drives that are known for being more reliable. That's about as best we can do.

I do intend to get the SA at some point. I was going to may be at the same time get a new SATA 3 drive instead of just using one that i already own. I'm not so sure now. I may just keep on using my old drive because for what i do i'd really be hard pressed to notice any difference.

The Samsung 470 looks like an all round good drive even though it is not SATA 3.

 

I agree with Rachel.
I have the best experience with Sammy drives in my Vaio notebooks, they have never failed. My OCZ and crucial did, though that were early models.
I recently bought a Samsung 470 and it is excellent.

 

ok this is my input on the matter:

-first of all i am by no means a big expert on hardware, i do gather info from the major online spots on the matter for obvious reasons since i do have the time and patience.. (i.e. anandtech, crucial/ocz/intel forums,tom'shardware,here,overclocker.net, and some random googling)




- so let's have a disclaimer xD in Real Life the difference between the worst SSD and the Best SSD are not so big and not all of them are noticeable.

when you compare random access on the Intel 510 and the Vertex 3 which have a very big speed gap on tests you find that on boot time or application loading time if there's a difference it's somewhere between 1~15 seconds (well generaly it's >5 seconds and only in some rare cases more.. geez i'd say in over 60% it will be less than 5 seconds, probably >40% will be less than 1 second)
So does it really matter?
my advice is to know what kind of consumer you are:
- average, which will never notice the difference and is better of with reliability and money saving

- "nerd"/overclocker which will notice the difference and will use the SSD on future systems and not just this laptop (which is for light use) and so has the knowledge and will to tweak stuff out.

-budget buyer. to this guys i say go buy a Crucial M4 or an Intel 320 period. if possible buy without tax and you'll be happy, real happy.
Intel if you want less issues.
Crucial if you want the better performance.(this will also get you more battery time)


about DOA, RMA and drive failure in general:

1. they ALL fail, all brands. one's do test more and in result get less failing drives. well, some can afford to test more really (Hint: they actually make the stuff that goes inside the SSD... AKA Intel, Micron(Crucial) and Samsung).

2. Despite what i just said Intel is the more reliable and compatible brand out there by a large margin. an Intel SSD will work out-of-the-box with just the general SSD care steps while OCZ's may require some fixes (and i'm narrowing this down to the SB in particular) not very troublesome stuff but still nobody likes stalls and mandatory tweaks.

3. Samsung is a major player in the NAND etc industry, and have really low drive failure, like Intel. but they pretty much suck performance-wise and Sony sells them for over double the price so i'd say to stay away unless you like to buy the PC and that's it just forget about it, no un-screwing 6 screws and switching the drive whatsoever. however Sony went with sammy because they have about the same reliability as Intel at a lower price. So it won't be a bad choice if you want to be the safest you can be..

4. SandForce drives have small compatibility but they have dramatically improved since the Vertex2. Meaning they don't have the same infamous problems anymore. but they do have some still which seem to have a cure for the symptoms on most cases but not a cure for the cause atm...


5. Crucial drives although very reliable have 2 problems:
-GarbageCollection. they may lose performance over time in the "right" scenario.
-firmware updates suck. they do more harm than good until they get it right. which can take months or can never be a problem,only time will tell (so i'm basing on the C300 experiences)


6. While drives DO fail they generally have little impact to the owner.. if they are DOA you can just get a new one. if they fail later, in most cases you still get to save the data. but of course many situations imply you lose the data suddenly so a backup from time to time is always a good idea. keep in mind the toolboxes check the drive health too. so again, data-killing problems generally come with lesser incidents before happening.Consider them as warnings.




SO to end this:

if you are the average guy which means you are not willing to take a risk and have latter or immediate problems that require some research and testing to overcome, go with Intel or Samsung or Crucial. with Intel being the king of less trouble and more money here. and Crucial the king of bang4buck. Samsung is the SB's SSD OEM, what more do you want? they are quite reliable. they should be if the lack of performance was an indicator. Probably more than Crucial since they have more roots on the hardware scene.


on the other hand if you know your stuff and have no problem with buying and returning, researching and testing the drives or taking the risk then by all means go for the Sandforce drives, the best for know being the Vertex3 and possibly waiting for Corsair could be a good idea. Corsair are considerably more reliable than OCZ but they share the same SF controller so some problems are shared too.

Remember that i said all drives fail? well the guys who are selling them also know that.. you can RMA,get a replacement or get a return pretty easily..
They have improved a lot since Gen1 and 2. Really a lot. Most owners are happy and not manny have been blazing trough forums like in the past but rather the one's with problems are a minority with not too serious issues which are normally compatibility related or bad/ignorant use.
but sh!t happens. that's life. so if you are concerned enough, again, go Intel.


SSD's can be compared to flying airplanes and HDD to ridding cars in the reliability matter. remember how they say planes are much safer than cars? and a lot more accidents happen to cars? well in the SSD generally there's more DOA than in HDD, but that aside they drive failure is similar and while SSD's can actually keep you data intact when they fail HDD corrupt all of it most of the times. the main SSD issues are always associated with other hardware, so they're compatibility problems or lose cables and bad controllers and stuff. but still planes crash, people die by the dozen at a time. but with cars a couple of people die at a time MANY times, so air travel rules safety wise. And SSD's rule on all matters except money and memory size.


this is more of a written bunch of thoughts than an actual review but still my 2cents, hope they'll help.

 

ak-xs, funny you should mention aeroplanes and flying - I've flown aircraft before and I study Aerospace Engineering

Thing is I am looking for a high-performance drive, but don't mind a bit of tweaking along the way as I'm very competent when it comes to tech.

Thing is with Corsairs despite the SF controllers they do not seem to have tweaked them to deliver the same performance that I've seen from OCZ's drives. That might be because they still haven't made any drives with the SF-2200 series controllers. I can't go for the Intels at all since I need a latest-gen drive with both high random and sequential read/write speeds, as I do do both small-file operations (like installing and loading games and heavy-duty applications) and large file operations (like rendering and viewing video), so I need an all-round fast drive, like the Vertex 3. The Intel 510 was very disappointing in random ops - the old X25 did better!

Essentially I need a drive that is around 240-256GB that is SATA III compatible. Plus I found the Vertex 3 240GB for around £320 without VAT. For reference, Sony charge around £250 without VAT to upgrade to a 128GB Sammy 470.

I do fall between 'average' and 'nerd/overclocker' in terms of what type of consumer I am'; I want and need the fastest tech I can get, but I'm also on a bit of a budget and, hence, can only buy one machine. That's why I'm getting the SA, upgrading it to max RAM and a fast SSD and then installing RivaTuner so I can OC the 6630M

BTW the only times I've had problems with HDDs is killing them in cheaper machines that I've borrowed My SZ's drive is in great shape, except for being full to the brim, so much so that I've got about 30GB of other applications installed on external drives... and I still need about 30GB more for others that need to be installed to C:\ I've also got s**tloads of films and other stuff on external drives (a full 160GB drive and a quarter-full 500GB one) with more stuff to come. Then there's the drives on computers at home...

The SSD market is interesting in that almost all manufacturers make their own NAND and there are also quite a few controller manufacturers, so there's a lot of competition and variety available. I'd love to see what Intel can do if they invested more in their drive controllers (looking at how well they're doing in the chipset and CPU industries), and can easily see them catch up with Sandforce in a couple of years.

Just so you know, I'm not that much of a noob, it's just I haven't yet taken the plunge into the world of SSDs and I don't want to have to shout down the phone for the next year trying to get replacement drives from a company with rubbish tech support after I paid £350 for a glorified flash drive! I understand the risks and have made my decisions as to what I'll do, I just want to know if my drive will break very often or only once while I own it. I will likely be going for a 240GB OCZ Vertex 3 because I'm a speed freak and it's actually surprisingly good value for money.

ak-xs, thanks for all the knowledge you poured into that post. It helped a lot. I did however already know a lot of what you said (I do also visit anandtech, tom's hardware, overclocker.net and other sites so I do know a fair bit about things like this already). It's more about someone giving me that nudge when I'm standing at the edge aeroplane's door about to do a skydive into SSD land!

Thanks also to Rachel and mobytoby, your comments sure helped.

I'm pretty sure that with how popular OCZ drives have become, their quality has improved, and I've read that their testing is much more stringent than before, so I guess I'll see for myself what the real-world effect will be when I get one.

 

i can relate to you The Z, lets start to say i also asked someone for the same pad in the back and i have the Vertex3 240Gb right in front of me xD i'm also no overclocker specially because i don't even have a desktop atm but i do tend to try to learn a bit and spend more effort in tweaking than the average guy but just not too much also... well i'm also studying engineering but on the dark arts of software design.. so i guess it's only natural that an engineer is by nature someone who seeks the fastest,latest, etc even if it imply's solving some problems and mastering the basics of an unknown subject,i mean it'd strange not to..

that same someone has an 120Gb and an SB which he claims had no problems whatsoever and i just which i had mine so i could test.. but on the OCZ forum there is a couple of threads with SB owners and some issues that seem to have solution like disabling the LPM, so unless in this coming months there are any revolutions that involve OCZ drives massive failure we should be fine..

 

So when can we expect to see the cto sa on sony's website?

 

Sorry guys, I'm sure it's been mentioned somewhere but this is a superlong thread. I'd just like to know when does this Vaio SA come out? Do we already know the specs? Where can I find more info? Thanks!

 

Well, in the UK a model is due to be released on the 2nd of June. I would expect the rest of the EU to have similar release dates.
The US usually lags behind the EU with the launch of new models so i'm not sure if the US will have the same release date.

Specs appear to be the same as the upper end SB models but the SA will have a higher res 1600x900 display and also be made out of carbon fibre reinforced plastics and AL.

 

Thanks Rachel, can we expect Sony to add it to their website for pre-order (and tech specs) earlier?

 

I`m starting to doubt that it will be released on Jun 2nd.
We are already past half of May and still no official announcement

 

Does anyone have an idea of how much lighter the SA will be relative to the SB? Will it be significant due the use of carbon fiber?

Sorry for this was already answered elsewhere in the thread.

 

^ A little bit lighter. 1,46 kg. Yes, the carbon fiber is the reason.

 

So can we assume it will be released before August 1 in the US? Because I'm looking for a laptop now but I can wait until the end of July to buy it.

Apart from the screen resolution and the carbon fiber, what else will be new?

 

A Sony dealer in Germany told me that to his knowledge the SA will not be coming at all. That is why they also added i7 CPU's to the SB range...and that (instead) a Z successor will come in september or so ....hm...

 

now let's wait for what beaups will come up with... there is a site already with SA configuration, a sony site, posted a few pages earlier.

 

http://www.sonystyle.ca/webapp/wcs/...0&catalogId=100803&LBomId=8198552921666339091

 

I know...but if i see things right, you cannot navigate to this link from the regular vaio pages...so it may have been prepared at a time where the SA was still planned to be released...I am not saying it will be like this, I am just saying it is not really a proof that what the dealer said is wrong.

 

can you place an order? there's an estimate ship date there, june 1

 

No, you can't and 10 days for a cto vaio is unrealistic even for SB series.

 

its not proof but if you search the same website on google and click the cached result, you'll see the sony website has been altered to not be so messy as it previously was. obviously someone made changes to the site, so who knows, maybe we can interpret that as good news.

 

If it not going to be June I'm gonna have to look elsewhere, it be 6 months since my xps 1330 died suriving on a netbook.
Why can'tcomputer companies just give us some release date information, at the very least sony coudl sick the high res screen on the SB.
Except there is very little competition and this end of the market, I think the only other make with half decent screens is lenovo.

 

Guys should I buy this Vaio SA or the upcoming Vaio Z? If money is not important.

 

If money is not an issue then wait for the Z

 

Well it really depends on what you want from a laptop.
Do you want integrated dedicated graphics and also an optical drive or do you want external dedicated graphics and an optical.
For me the SA meets my needs.
If you don't care about these things and if the Z has a better display then may be go for that.

The SA seems like it may also be lighter than the Z with the external unit included.
Also, the SA will also use carbon fibre like the Z.
Lower end Z's may also come with a 1600x900 display. If you like the higher res and not everyone does 1920x1080 then this is again going to be a plus for you if you're considering the Z.

If you go for an SA with an SSD price wise there will not be that much difference between both models.

 

Ok, so this may be a stupid post, or it might have been covered in the previous 247 pages (but I don't have the patience to search for it), but does anyone have an idea about the build quality of the SA? I was super interested in the SB until one review mentioned the hinges won't stay in one place, then I went to best buy and played around on the SC which felt SUPER cheap and had the same hinge problem. Is the SA going to be of similar quality? 'Cause, if so, I am just going to have to cross it off my list.

Thanks

 

The SA is slightly lighter and is made of carbon fiber + some aluminum. So the build quality SHOULD be better than the plastic SB and SC. But we have to wait and see.

 

Sony Canada has updated the SA page again... Looks like it is definitely coming. Strange to see no SSD option so far.

CTO | Customize | Sony Canada

 

If you compare it with the SB (spec-for-spec), the SA is $350 more expensive. I hope the SA screen is amazing for that price because I don't see any other noticeable differences (unless the chassis is of different materials).

 

The price difference is almost entirely down to the quality of the screen, the materials used for the chassis (carbon fiber/aluminum) and lighter weight. It may also be manufactured in Japan but this is only speculation thus far.

 

I keep on hearing this but is there any actual confirmed news that the SA is using better materials for the chassis compared to the SB?

 

PC Mag's hands-on review from CES is one of the sources:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/7032124-post77.html

 

yes, there is of course. you can believe that it's using carbon fiber and aluminum (sb is magnesium and aluminum). and you can google or searchh this thread, but as you can guess it will be hard to find in less than 5 minutes because of all the "noise" arround the SB/SA models and events... if the forum search tool was working it'd be easy but you can use google to search this thread and you'll find links...

or you can just as rachel or someone who still remembers the links..

 

Still 1400 without slice and bluray?

 

Does anybody have any idea if the keyboard is user replaceable on the SB and SA models?

Due to cost savings I'm thinking of buying from USA (with US physical keyboard layout), but really need to change the keyboard later on to my Nordic standard.

 

^
Try the owners lounge, also take a look at the SB guide that was posted earlier in this thread.
http://www.2shared.com/document/2H6o87X-/inside.html

There was an inside document from Sony posted that confirmed that the SA would be made out of CRP and Al but the forum member who posted the document edited out.

 

The customizable SA with SSD is on a different page on the canadian site:
http://www.sonystyle.ca/webapp/wcs/...d=20153&langId=200&LBomId=8198552921666340150

 

the dates on the customization pages has changed to the 2nd also

 

Thanks. Interesting that it is still not linked from the main site. It looks like it is ready to go up at any moment.

It would be good to know if the 1600x900 is a premium display. It's not specified yet but given the price difference from the SB, it looks almost certain.

 

I went thru the customization process and only in the last step where it should place the order it failed, so I believe it's certainly going on, SA is near =D

 

I'm pretty sure that the base display is a display plus (if i remember right, think beaups mentioned it too).
Should be an upgrade option to premium tho, but not sure.

 

It looks like the SA is shaping up to be a nice, relatively affordable machine. A few quick questions:

• How much does it weigh?
• How thick is it?
• Does it have USB 3.0?
• Does it have a carbon fiber case like the Z?
• Are there any released pictures of the machine or does it look pretty much like the SB?

 

No-one knows for sure how much it weighs. It's been reported to weigh about 3.2lbs though and that's coming from Sony's earliest development document about the SA which was at one point linked in this thread.
The thickness again no-one knows for sure. I guess in about a week we should know this for sure.

Yes, it will have USB 3.0, even the SB/SC has that now.

Yes, it should also use CRFP.

It could be possible that the SA gets silver trackpad buttons but that waits to be seen.
Is this one of Sony's final release pictures?
http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/imag...ony/Vaio_VPCSA1X9EXI_750px_2._V171596429_.jpg

 

Amazon says 1.63kg, VAIO Display Plus screen

 

I saw that and posted about it earlier. Amazon are not always correct on specs so it could possibly be an error or it may be correct. A few sellers have other versions of the SA listed between 1-1.5kg in this weight bracket. I guess it still waits to be seen.
The vaio display plus screen i think is pretty much certain for preconfig models.

 

I can't believe I read most of the post here.

I too was looking at a 13in Laptop and was bummed that the Sony S only had a max resolution of 1366x768. I was deciding on either getting the Sony S or the Macbook Pro 13in. It was either higher resolution or dedicated graphics.

I found this site and started reading about the SONY S out is the SB and there is a SA with a higher resolution. Now I gotta wait to see how well the screen is to make my final choice.

Oh and SONY put the SA on its US site here.
Ultra Mobile Laptops VAIO S Series | Sony USA
Checking all the options to the highest choice came in at $5399.98 That's just insane.