Fastest laptop disk setup ever?

People that know me will know I have a bit of a love affair with shiny laptops, but also that I have high standards and if something isn’t right then I won’t accept it. I have sent back a total of NINE (just done a quick count and even surprised myself!) for full refunds over the past 3 years and in fact due to these refunds until a few days ago I still had the very same £2.5k I spent in late 2006! It might sound like the ideal situation, but its not all sipping champagne and using bleeding edge laptops for a few weeks at a time, it was actually a real nightmare not having a laptop you can rely on!

But anyway, I have just finished my latest round of research, searching the owners forums, etc and have parted with my hard earned money once again. I have a shiny new Sony Vaio Z-Series: http://www.sony.co.uk/product/vn-z-series and first impressions are excellent, which is unusual for me.

In the past I have always gone for power over portability, have never bought anything smaller than 17” (weighing around the 4kg mark) and they have always been “pimped” out with the highest specs possible. They have not really been laptops as such, more portable desktop PCs with a TFT strapped to the top!

This little ZSeries laptop is 13” and defies belief in many ways. First of all it is the lightest laptop I have ever seen weighing in at just 1.4kg – yet the specifications would have me believe I am still using one of my 17” monster laptops:

• Latest Core i7 processor? .
• 8GB RAM?
• 1920×1080 Screen?
• Discrete 1GB NVidia 330m dedicated graphics card for performance?
• Onboard Intel graphics for battery life?
• Multi-touch track pad?
• Fingerprint Reader, TPM chip, Internal DVD ROM, Internal 3G card? 3x USB?
• 6 hour battery life?

EDIT – Forgot to mention the cooling, it gets warm at the back left corner (by ESC key) and apart from that runs really cool

But the real beauty of this laptop is the disk setup. Solid state of course, but Sony have done their normal thing of designing a proprietary format that is neither interchangeable or upgradable. At first glance I was rolling my eyes and thinking how pointless it was, but closer inspection didn’t take long to convince me.

Essentially they have done on their hard disk what Intel/AMD are doing on their processors with multiple cores. In the same space as a standard 2.5” laptop disk they have crammed a total of FOUR SSDs and used an Intel raid controller to RAID0 them for performance. SSDs are quick these days, but think of having FOUR all working together!

The benchmarks are nothing short of amazing and despite its size it feels like the quickest PC I have ever used, notice I said PC there not just laptop. Some benchmarks are:

 

I ran this test a total of five times, each time the results were almost identical. It really is that quick! For comparison I ran the same benchmark on a Dell XPS1330 with a standard 300GB 5.4k 2.5” laptop disk:

See what I mean! Sure the RAID0 means there is technically more chance of a failure, but its not like the old spindle ways – there are no moving parts and the failure rates of SSDs are much, much lower. For this level of performance I’m happy to take my chances.

All that is left is to congratulate Sony on a machine nothing short of amazing! Well done and I’m sure other vendors will follow suit shortly! But for now, if it is performance you are looking for and don’t mind paying a premium – look no further.

NOTE – There are some complications of using RAID with SSD disks because of the TRIM functionality, but its not that much of a big deal and I’ll cover it in detail with a future article.