I am looking at buying the Z690/790 with the SSD RAID configuration and was looking for more information on the size and interfaces of the SSDs used in RAID configuration.
a. Are they 2.5" inch drives or 1.8" inch drives?
b. Do they have SATA interface or some other interface
As a proud Vaio Z owner (and at the same time a poorly payed PhD student), I opted for the cheap Z with the 128GB SSD and I am already almost at full capacity.
I am looking for someway to expand my available storage. SD cards would be one option but high capacity ones are expensive, read/write speeds are not that good and I have had reliability issues with most removable media I've used in the past so I would not want to put my work-critical files on them.
I have come across these expressCard based SSD drives:
Amazon.com: Wintec FileMate 48GB Ultra ExpressCard Solid State Drive 3FMS4D48M-WR - PCI-e, Mini USB 2.0: Electronics
that seem to provide relatively good performance. However they seem a bit unreliable from the reviews, so I am still not particularly keen on getting one.
Has anyone come across any viable alternatives to the above drives?
Interesting article here:
[url]
What do you say about this, is it true, did you notice and reduce of speed and after how long?
I plan to buy a RAID 0 SSD Z serie notebook, but if this problems are true, I just need to stick with my current SZ for some time then.
What is Battery Drain?
-When your computer is turned off or in sleep mode and looses large amounts of battery life.
How do I know if I am affected?
-To my knowledge, ALL Vaio CW computers (at least with the i5 and 330m combo). I have come to to this conclusion because I have had two of these with the same issue and I have yet to see more than one person say they do not have it on a Vaio CW
How can I fix this?
-Right now there is no fix for loosing battery life while 'Shutdown'. As for sleep mode, you can help make the loss less substantial by doing a 'clean install'
Instructions here
And also make sure that you have these settings in the 'advanced power options'
Tests:
All tests have been run on two different VPCCW27FX notebooks
Test 1: 100% Battery, 4 hrs shutdown: 90%
Test 2: 65% Battery, no HDD, 3hrs shutdown: 48%
Test 3: 48% Battery, 'Power Saver' battery mode, 5.5 hrs shutdown: 20%
Test 4: Wifi Switch off
Test 5: 50% Battery, Battery out: 50%
Conclusions:
At the time being, there is no fix or known cause for the battery drain while shutdown. For now, myths of a clean install or using different windows battery settings make no difference, which means this is either a problem with the motherboard, BIOS or the battery it's self.
I'm about to take the plunge and order the vaio z from sonystyle uk, i was looking for the fastest, reasonably portable with good resolution laptop, and while I was looking for screen little bit bigger than the vaio z (15"-16") I couldn't really find anything that would go as fast the vaio z while still being under 17" and light enough to carry around.
But all my searching was based on the fact that I want to raid 0 two fast SSDs.
But is it really worth it? will two x18-Ms in Raid0 on the vaio z raid controller be really faster than one x25-M?
Also is it possible to DIY the raid? I did some reading and while I found some threads talking about the parts used to do the raid i couldn't get a clear answer whether it's easy to do the raid yourself.
One other question is that on sonysyle uk you have the most expensive vaio z having the carbon fibre option, while anything cheaper doesn't say so, does that mean the others are not carbon fibre? how different would a carbon fibre vaio z be VS non carbon fibre?
I'm thinking of purchasing the new sony Z-1190 laptop. Some of the options have only one drive (say 128GB X 1, or 256 X 1) but still supposedly have raid 0. How is this possible (I thought that more than one drive was needed)? Would there be a performance difference between the 256X1 or the 192 (64X1 + 128X1)?
View 10 Replies View RelatedI've got the HDD option, which replaces the optical drive with a normal HDD, and doesn't come with proprietary Sony SSDs. I've been thinking about and testing RAID configurations, and this thread is meant to gather some thoughts on that. At some level it's probably easier to go the Sony SSD route, but... I prefer something else
There are two parts: (1) external RAID, (2) internal RAID.
Part 1: External RAID
I went down this path because I believed that there's only one SATA port offered by the HDD-option. From Intel [url], it appears that the port multiplier functionality is not implemented in the ICH8, which is what the Z1 comes with. This means we can't get two or more drives to logically share the same SATA port, which means that they have to appear as one logical device, which in turn means that some sort of external RAID/BIG hardware is needed.
I tried a number of hardware RAID solutions. The first was the Silicon Image SiI 4726, in a mini-board with a form between the 2.5" and 1.8" drives. Unfortunately, after configuration on a (old) desktop, the chip offers only its admin drive ("Config") to the bios and Windows, rendering it impossible to boot off of...........
how much faster are the tri and quad raid configurations compared to dual raid? I know bench tests show that the tri and quad raid are significantly faster but how does this translate into real world use? will opening programs be twice as fast or games will load twice as fast?
View 3 Replies View RelatedWould the size of the FW be a problem in college? Or I'd be better off with a 13" laptop?
View 3 Replies View RelatedI'm doing a bit of research - I'm getting an M1730 as a replacement for a dead M1710 (Cheapest DELL XPS M1730 ever???) .. so I can't really change the spec of the machine until I get it .........
View 10 Replies View RelatedI might need to put a new hard drive in my daughter's 3 year old E1505. Would it be an SATA drive?
View 5 Replies View RelatedIs any personal information stored on the recovery drive/partition?
View 10 Replies View Relatedi just got an nc2400, seems to be a pretty great machine maybe greater with some optimizations
-overclocking. it seems very quiet and cool, has anyone overclocked with success?
-hdd in optical bay caddy, i want to know more about this. mainly, is the optical drive SATA, or would it basically be the same PATA interface as the old HDD?
im thinking the best thing for this laptop is either a PCMCIA SSD or PCMCIA to SATA for an at least normal hard drive speed.
unless mini pcie is the way to go? if anyone else has tried and succeeded at addressing the problem of slow hdd interface, id like to know your experience. i tried the intel 5100 mini card in the slot, said incompatible wifi device remove and restart at the bios. i guess this could be a general thing, with chipsets or something.
This is a weird one, my new M1730 has RAID 0 2x160GB but they are different makes of hard drive:
Hard Drive Member 1: Hitachi HTS722016K9A300
Hard Drive Member 2: FUJITSU MHW2160BJ G2
If you are an M1730 owner I would be interested in what drives you have. Dell have tried to fob me off and told me all M1730 have this config.
Although it works OK I can't see that this is good practice - I would have expected matched drives.
who opened I believe Z and connected a hard drive to dvd drive connector while leaving dvd drive in for cosmetic reasons. Can't find this thread. Where exactly can the hard drive go? Inside the tray?
I am afraid there will be too much vibration if I put regular HD there. For this reason I would rather put there SSD but is there a way to make this a primary OS drive? Seems like last bios allows to boot from optical drive.
- is-it possible to put two hard drive and enable raid fonction, i saw that it's possible to put two hard drive but on the bios there nothing
- is-it possible to install another OS ( Vista 64 or Seven 64 ) ? I read there are problem with the driver for the video card.
I have an Inspiron 700m and the hard drive finally died. I saw a few posts on what type of hard drive to get, but does anyone know what's the maximum size I can use?
View 11 Replies View RelatedI'm wondering if the Blu-ray optical drive (Panasonic UJ-232A) of the (old) VAIO Z series will be able to fit into the (new) VAIO Z series? I would really appreciate it if anyone is able to answer my question.
The reason I'm asking is because I'm seriously thinking of selling my VAIO Z690 & just buying the base Sony VAIO Z (VPCZ112GX/S). I may just be able to afford that base model & the icing on the cake will definitely be the UJ-232A drive being able to fit into the (new) VAIO Z series & work.
Is the hard drive interface SATA or SATA II?
View 10 Replies View RelatedI am thinking of upgrading the hard drive on my Dell E1405. I was just curious if there is some kind of limit as to how big a drive I can get or is just whatever my wallet will tolerate.
In addition, can anyone point me to the "correct" hard-drive that my laptop supports? (I'm assuming it's a SATA drive.)
I wasn't sure what type (if there is one) that I need to buy for my laptop. Just anything on amazon or fry.com, or something along those lines.
whats the maxmimum GB harddrive i can put in the 5310, currently running a 250GB although i think the 500GB are SATA2 will the 5310 accept SATA2 hard drives?
View 7 Replies View RelatedI have done some research, and found some 500gb SATA HDD's for laptops, but I have noticed that they are 5400rpm. The fastest large drive I have found is a new Hitachi, 320 7200rpm drive (which is supposedly coming out and will probly cost a fortune) Some told me that the speed doesn't make a difference when they are a big drive. If I get a 5400 rpm drive will it kill my gaming (oblivion, Half life 2, Bioshock, etc.
View 11 Replies View RelatedRecently my brand new studio 17 updated, about a week later I noticed that 50GB had gone missing! I of course called tech support to see if they could help (good luck) after spending hours on the phone they could not really solve the issue, asides from doing a factory reset.
Now again I am having this issue again, once Vista updated it is slowly eating away hard drive space. There is currently 31.4GB being used (yes, this includes all hidden files) on a 450GB hard drive, yet the system reports only 402 GB free space. Each day it decreases about 2-4 GBs ......
I originally purchased my E1705 with a 60GB 7200RPM drive. I believe at the time it was mainly to save a few bucks and that the largest 7200RPM available may have been around 120GB and added $200 to the price of the machine.
I am constantly finding myself uninstalling applications and looking for things to delete to save space on this tiny little drive, it has gotten to the point that it is a hassle. I recently moved my music library to an external USB drive to free up about 20GB only to fill it again right away by installing Visual Studio 2008 and the MSDN Library.
I need more drive space!
I know there are a ton of options out there for drives which I can easily swap right into this machine but I am having a tough time trying to decide if I am willing to sacrifice the added speed of a 7200RPM drive for the additional space offered by the largest of the 2.5" drives.
I use this machine for everything, it is my primary computer so having the fastest available options is desirable. I frequently render digital video for the creation of DVDs and believe it or not I perform this function currently on external USB drives because of the space issues. Having th space to move this to the primary drive with the full speed interface will be a big plus.
Just wondering to all those with an Ispiron 9300 what is the maximum supported hard drive size. According to dell chat it is 100Gb...but of course that doesn't mean anything. I have the 9300 with an SATA drive .
View 10 Replies View Relatedmy 13.3" VGN-SZ650N/C so far but I also want to get a used TZ series 11" Vaio Laptop but most of the models are only using slower 1.8 " 4200rpm drive.
Assume if I got a decent issue of a used TZ from eBay, is it worthy to spend extra $$ to upgrade those 1.8 " 4200 rpm drive to something faster ?
I purchased a Sony AW230J/H believing it would be easy to convert to a RAID 0 array by installing my 2 Intel SSD drives. Turns out on this particular model they turned the RAID options off in the BIOS so I can't access it, and install a NON-RAID version of Intel Storage! But, striping/mirroring are available in the native VISTA Storage of Manage Computer! So, how can I create a RAID on drives that are already being used to boot into the OS? Or does anyone know any tricks to turn ON the RAID Bios so I can configure it PRE-OS installation? When I right click on the 2nd SSD (unpartiioned) all options for mirrow/striping/etc are available, but no drives to add to it. My primary drive has those items greyed out?
View 9 Replies View RelatedI have a Sony Vaio FZ445 which has problems with the Otiarc DVD AD-7560. What happens is that when playing audio, the sound skips playing CDs.
I have tried all the requisite diagnostics, like checking the IDE channels to see if the mode is DMA or PIO, and installing and reinstaling the drivers and firmware updates for the drive. It still happens and looks like I need a new DVD drive. I have XP Pro and Ubuntu 9 and it does this in both OS's (which affirms my suspicion that its not a codecs or driver issue). I have also always cleaned the drive every dozen uses too.
am I limited to using only a new Sony DVD drive to replace it? and... is it easy to replace these drives oneself?
Will the Sony Vaio VGN-FW390 Blu-ray Disc read only drive read actual information discs? Not DVDs, but actual CDs?
View 5 Replies View RelatedAll of a sudden my OPTIARC BD ROM 5500A drive does not recognize when a Blu-ray movie is inserted. I try to open the drive with a movie inside and it tells me to please insert a disc and ejects the drive.
I chated with the sony analysts and they told me to (in this order after the previous solution did not work):
1. Update WinDVD player
2. Reinstall WinDVD player
3. Update WinDVD player again
4. Restore my C: drive to factory conditions
5. Reset by BIOS
6. Take my laptop to a Sony shop and pay 600 dollars to get this fixed.
Everything points to hardware malfunction, but I find it weird that in my computer the drive is identified as a DVD-RW drive, when I KNOW that it used to be identified as a BD/DVD-RW drive.
DVDs and CDs play perfectly, but it acts like nothing is inside when I put in a Blu/RAy movie. In the device manager it is identified properly as an OPTIARC BD ROM, the driver it has is the generic CD drive windows driver (Sony support said that is what it should have).
Driver: cdrom.sys
File version: 6.0.6000.16386 (vista_rtm.061101/2205)