Sony Vaio Z Laptop Packs Quad-SSDs in RAID 0
This one is packing a badass quad-SSD in RAID 0 configuration.
Some of Sony's laptops occupy the upper echelon of high-end luxury PCs, and its newly unveiled Vaio Z series is an exemplary top-of-the-line model.
Making waves is Sony's design of including up to four solid state drives inside the Vaio Z, which can write data in parallel in RAID 0. Sony boasts that this quad-SSD configuration will perform file transfers up to 6.2 times faster compared with traditional 5400 rpm laptop hard drives.
Those looking for some 3D will be pleased to know that the Vaio Z will pack a Nvidia GeForce GT330M graphics chipset with 1GB GDDR3 VRAM. Displaying those pixels is a 13.1-inch display comes in a Full HD 1920 x 1080 resolution, or 1600 x 900.
Weighing below 3.2 lbs, the all-new Vaio Z Series is crafted from carbon fibre and aluminum for a mix of rigidity and lightness.
For CPUs, the Vaio Z will be packing either an Intel Core i7-620 2.66 GHz or Core i7-520 2.4 GHz. Both models will come with 64-bit Windows 7 Professional.
The new VAIO Z Series of high-performance ultra-mobile notebook computers by Sony is available from the end of March in Europe and April in North America. No pricing is announced yet, but expect them to in at under $2,000.
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Why not RAID5?
GT330M?
mi1ez, the GT 330 M is on the NVIDIA website - 48 CUDA cores.
Why not RAID5?
Because RAID5 is actually slower at writing data, because of the overhead required for the parity computation and write.
While SSD media seems to have a lower fail rate compared to the electro-mechanical drives, it may indeed be an issue if *any* of those drives fail (your array will be FUBAR).
Having parity or mirroring-enabled hardware has it's place in enterprise sectors, where the data may be indeed critical to a business. Putting this architecture in a laptop won't have many advantages, even when 1 drive fails, many users don't know how to replace it (it's not hot-swappable like in a server rack), and they won't know what that RAID boot error is trying to say - remember that this laptop fits more in the luxury sector, and a bit less in the business or professional sectors.
Having replaced dead HDDs in a number of our company Vaio laptops (and we're a small company so the failure rate seems high to me) I can confirm they are not hot swap or even easy to get to (you have to take the case apart - a total of 10 screws to get the drive out, plus 4 more which attach the mounts to the drive).
I just thought that, if they're going to put in four drives and RAID, why not offer other options (1+0 or 5) if you don't want to lose everything the moment on drive fails. As I mention above, our failure rate on mechanical drives means I don't trust Vaio's too much these days.
Given that Sony eventually allowed Intel VT to work on Vaio laptops they might do something better if enough people complain.
Doh, where's that edit button!!! I meant "the moment ONE drive fails".
Dr_M0rph3us;
Rubbish I use raid-5 in my desktop. It's by far the cheapest disk level raid storage solution due to only losing 33% of disk space.
The only problem with using raid-5 in this configuration would be the fact the motherboard will be using a software raid controller. Software raid controllers and raid-5 do not mix well due to the parity calculations required.
However my guess is it's probably a ICH10 Southbridge so I guess you could use raid levels 0,1,5,10.
@roots
I agree with you on your comment, but please abstain to call my comments "rubbish" without documenting the answer (although I see your answer agrees with my comment).
I too have experience in enterprise-level hardware solutions, and have installed many RAID systems in NAS racks: on hardware RAID controllers having their own CPU and memory, RAID5 works like a charm. In a laptop, you pointed out the problem yourself
If it would work, I'd use RAID10 on that laptop. I don't care too much about storage capacity, because you can always hook up a 1 or 2 TB HDD drive for general multimedia / massive capacity use, and I'd go for data integrity first - or maybe I'm just too paranoid seeing 1 or 2 drives fail every week in the datacenter.
Cheers.