Sony Style: Are at least some of the built to order upgrades greatly discounted? (namely the SSD upgrade for the new Z)

I've been keenly, giddily, childishly interested in the new Sony Z. In checking out the customization options, I noticed that the SSD upgrade pricing seems heavily discounted compared to what the price would be if you bought the SSD drives at shops like Newegg or OtherWorldComputing.

Sony Style's upgrade cost from the base unit of 128GB to the 512GB (256GBx2) with RAID 0 is $1000. The leaves the buyer with an extra 128GB at hand, that is worth at the least, $255, going by Newegg's lowest price.

At Newegg, the cost of 256GB SDDs range from $670 to $1,060. So if you take a low, round figure of $700, buying from Newegg to do the upgrade to 512GB would cost $1,400.

It seems to me there is the potential problem that the new Sony Z employs some unique Sony innovation, "Quad SSD," thus upgrading yourself, if even possible, may result in an inferior SSD setup.

Nonetheless, is this a heavily discounted upgrade offered by Sony Style and is it representative of the prices for other component upgrades as well? It certainly seems in stark contrast to Apple's upgrading options which are often twice the actual retail price.

Thanks for any help.

 

While the SSD's aren't going to be Intel X25's they *shouldn't be really cheap SSD's. And the configuration is striped RAID 0 for the Quad SSD... Raid0 is basically splitting any amount of data into as many chunks as you have drives... so 4 drives should be a LOT faster than 1 ssd (nearly 4x). There's overhead that will cost you some of that, but with a well designed controller you should see a huge performance kick, especailly since access time and latency aren't the issues they are with HDD's. And the 3Gb/s limit doesn't apply if they plug each of the 4 SSDs into seperate sata ports.

I just have a really bad feeling that if this configuration tears up in any way, it's going to be a witch to fix and on the bank account.

 

From my understanding, though I'm not as tech savvy as most people here, Sony's SSD in this model doesn't appear to be the standard SSD. In this official Sony video ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEOd8hbYf0E ), at the 1:40 min point, it's explained that they shrunk the standard SSD size by 30%.

So these SSDs seem uniquely different; and when combined into a quartet does it sound like they'd also be faster than other Quad SSD setups (I've also read it's the first ever Quad SSD setup in a laptop)?

They further add that it's 6x faster than the conventional 5400rpm HDD. However, are all SSDs generally 6x faster than a 5400rpm HDD?

By tearing up you merely mean malfunction? And why would it be particularly hard to fix?

Thanks for your reply.

 

They were talking about sequential r/w speed compared to best 2.5" which are 90-100 MB/s. That is 540-600 MB/s (confirmed by CrystalMark tests) - good for hibernation or copying large files from SSD to itself.

In real life dual X-18M will outperform Sony's QUAD setup due to higher random r/w performance. Lets hope one can make LIF - MicroSATA adapter to accommodate Intel SSD inside of Vaio Z.