SSDs and Noise
Quad SSD drives in RAID0
Apart from the Full HD screen the biggest news for this year's refresh is the RAID0 SSD drives that most of the new Z's come with. In this particular model the drives consist of two physical drives, each outfitted with 2 x 64GB SSD drives - meaning it contains 4 x 64GB SSD drives in a RAID0 setting. RAID0 takes these four physical drives and makes them into one logical drive of 256GB - something which has a dramatic effect on performance. Read speeds are in the 500-600MB/s region - and overall performance is Roadrunner-like (meep-meep).
TRIM support
As explained by our own Jon here, TRIM is very important when it comes to SSD drives. The command allows the operating system to automatically perform garbage collection routines and inform the SSD which data blocks, for example those made up of a deleted file, can be considered suitable for preferential writing, thereby avoiding the need to cache the current information while it erases the block’s contents. If TRIM is not supported the drive’s read and write performance will seriously deteriorate over time.
The problem with using RAID on SSD drives is that until now TRIM support has not been around. 1-2 months ago Intel released new drivers that were rumoured to include support for SSD drives in a RAID setup – but after some further investigations that seems not to be the case. This means that currently there is no TRIM support for this setup – something that potentially will make the drives slower over time, at least until drivers that will fix the problem are released.
So – the drivers for the RAID configuration do not include TRIM support as of yet – but the garbage collection that is included in the current setup seems to do a pretty good job and will keep the drives fairly speedy until Intel decides to release RAID-enabled TRIM drivers.
For further reading and news on the latest updates, it's a good idea to bookmark the following pages over at Notebook Review: http://forum.notebookreview.com/sony/469272-sony-z11-long-term-ssd-performance-post-your-results.html and http://forum.notebookreview.com/sony/477806-sony-z11-frequently-asked-questions.html.
Fan Noise
Some people have been complaining about a high pitched fan noise - but that is not true for my machine. I am particularly easily disturbed by fan noise and this machine does not bother me much – if at all. At idle it is virtually silent – only a slight humming noise can be heard, and although when running benchmarks, games etc the fans do spin up it's not something I would consider a problem. My old laptops sound a lot higher at both idle and when busy.
Speakers, VGA web cam
The speakers are rather disappointing - but I guess the limited size of this laptop makes it hard putting in decent drivers. They are usable - but only just. Music fans will certainly want to instead plug the laptop into something more substantial. The web cam is in VGA resolution - which again is rather disappointing considering the price tag. It would be nice to see these aspects of the specification tackled in next year's update.
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