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Sony has announced an updated Vaio Z lineup today. Vaio Z is Sony’s premium 13” laptop series which essentially packs performance of a 15” laptop into a smaller form factor. As expected, the updated lineup includes new Sandy Bridge CPUs but what really makes it interesting is the support for Light Peak and a BTO option for external Power Media Dock with a discrete GPU. 

Sony Vaio Z specifications

 

Standard

Built-to-order options

Screen

13.1" (anti-glare)

N/A

Resolution

1600×900

1920×1080

Processor

Intel Core i5-2410M (2.3GHz, 3MB L3)

i5-2540M (2.6GHz, 3MB L3), i7-2620M (2.7GHz, 4MB L3)

Graphics

Intel HD 3000

Power Media Dock with AMD 6650M

Storage (SSD)

128GB

256GB, 512GB; 128GB, 256GB, 512GB (SATA 6Gb/s)

Memory

4GB 1333MHz DDR3

8GB 1333MHz DDR3

Connectivity

WiFi (802.11a/b/g/n), 3G, Bluetooth

Wireless WAN

Ports

USB 2.0, docking station/USB 3.0, HDMI out

N/A

Battery

Up to 7 hours

Up to 14 hours (external)

Dimensions(DxHxW)

8.3" x 0.66" x 13.0"

N/A

Weight

2.6lb

N/A

Price

£1195 (~14)

Varies

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Unfortunately Sony has yet to update their USA page to include the updated Vaio Z. The European page has already been updated, thus the usage of pounds in the table. The Dollar pricing is an exact transfer of the VAT-less UK price but it gives us a hint that the standard Vaio could be around 00 in the US. Sony's UK page says ships in 3-4 weeks so expect late July availability. 

The new Vaio Z is significantly thinner and lighter than the old Vaio Z: It weighs in just 2.6lbs and has height of 0.66” compared to its 3.04lbs and 1.3” predecessor. It’s actually slightly thinner than the MacBook Air (0.66” vs 0.68”). MacBook Air’s design is slanted though so at its thinnest point, it’s much thinner than the new Vaio Z. Vaio Z is also quite noticeably lighter than 13” MacBook Air or Samsung 9 Series, which weigh 2.9lbs and 2.88lbs respectively. 

The main reason why the new Vaio Z is so much lighter and thinner than its predecessor is the lack of a discrete GPU. It comes with Intel HD 3000 which is integrated into the CPU die, whereas the old Vaio Z came with a discrete NVIDIA GT 330M. However, Sony has provided an interesting solution to this. They have announced a Power Media Dock (PMD) which is basically a souped up external optical drive. The external dock has an AMD Radeon HD 6650M with 1GB of DDR3 in it as well. The AMD 6650M allows you to connect up to two displays to the PMD so you can have a total four displays: two attached to the PMD, one attached to the laptop’s HDMI port and obviously the laptop’s integrated LCD. 

AMD 6650M specifications

Shaders

480

GPU frequency

600MHz

Memory

1GB DDR3

Memory frequency

900MHz

Memory bus width

128-bit

To make this worthwhile, Sony uses Intel’s Light Peak technology (yes, Sony calls it Light Peak, not Thunderbolt) which provides up to 10Gb/s of bandwidth in each direction. A GPU requires lots of bandwidth which is why USB, especially 2.0, is not suitable for powerful external GPUs. There are plenty of USB video adapters which are fundamentally external GPUs but they are not suitable for gaming or other GPU heavy tasks by any means. What makes Sony’s implementation different from Apple’s is the fact that Sony uses a combo-port that combines USB and Light Peak into one, instead of Mini DisplayPort connector like Apple. Sony actually calls the port a docking station/USB port. It can function as a regular USB 3.0 port as well. 

The Power Media Dock comes in three flavors. The cheapest one is a normal DVD drive. The second option is a Blu-Ray player. The most expensive option is a Blu-Ray writer as you might have guessed. PMDs with Blu-Ray are only available from Sony’s online store whereas the DVD PMD will be available through resellers as well. The PMD supports up to two external monitors: one via HDMI and one via VGA. There is also a Gigabit Ethernet port, two USB 2.0 ports and one USB 3.0 port. 

One issue with the PMD is its price. The cheapest one is £400 which translates to 0. Take away UK’s VAT which is 20% and we get 2, so the cheapest PMD will most likely retail for 0. That sounds pretty expensive, considering that AMD 6650M is an underclocked AMD 6570 (our review) which goes for around . Combine that with DVD drive and you get what Sony calls Power Media Dock. 

Then there's the concern about performance. Sony must be running PCIe over Light Peak, but you only get a maximum of 1.25GB/s of bandwidth to/from the GPU – assuming no additional overhead. While the 6650M is likely much faster than Sandy Bridge's intergrated GPU, it's potentially slower than an on-board 6650M would have been because of the Light Peak bottleneck.

Conclusions

Vaio Z is definitely the most portable of the current 13" ultraportables and it packs in a nice amount of power. However, its pricing makes it too expensive compared to most of its competitiors. 13" MacBook Air starts at 99 so the cheapest Vaio Z will be at least 0 more expensive if UK's pricing is comparable to US's. Even the Lenovo X1 starts at 99 nowadays and it features exactly the same CPUs. The biggest market for Vaio Z seems to be in the high-end ultraportable market. No other brand offers 512GB SSD or 1080p screen at the moment for example. 

Power Media Dock sounds interesting but the price tag is everything else but attractive. For the same amount of money, you could grab for instance NVIDIA GTX 580, which is the fastest single chip GPU as of today. With PMD, you will be limited to AMD 6650M which isn't exactly a great GPU for gaming in the first place. At 0, you would hope for something much, much better than a DVD+GPU combo that struggles to play games at decent quality. We have seen external GPUs before but they have always failed miserably. Sony's attempt doesn't seem too promising either but at least we now have a port that is capable of external GPUs: Thunderbolt/Light Peak. There is hope that third parties will release cheaper and faster solutions, the most promising being Sonnet's Echo Express, which supports full size PCIe cards (though no word on GPU support). 

As the world becomes increasingly more mobile, external GPUs may be a solution to the problem of balancing portability with performance. Light Peak is a great way to get data out of a system however we may need to see a next-generation version of the interface, with higher bandwidth to really make sense for high performance external GPU solutions.

TAIWANESE HARDWARE FIRM Asus has announced its BW-12D1S-U, an external Blu-ray optical writer drive capable of upscaling to high definition and conversion from 2D to 3D.

The main purpose of the drive is for users to convert DVDs to Blu-ray format. The drive is capable of upscaling non-HD DVDs to high definition standards.

The drive also offers full HD 1080p 2D to 3D conversion, a feature that is appearing on TVs and notebooks from companies like LG and Toshiba, respectively. However, the results of 2D to 3D conversion will not equal the quality of native 3D content, of course.

Audio performance for all Blu-ray content supports both Dolby EX and 5.1-channel DTS-HD. A stand is supplied with the drive so it can sit vertically as well as horizontally.

Asus claims the drive is the “world’s fastest external 3D Blu-ray writer” This is quite possibly true considering the sparse and rather niche market for this type of drive. The drive is capable of writing speeds of up to 12x via its USB 3.0 interface.

Asus has not quoted a price for the BW-12D1S-U Blu-ray drive or when it will be available. µ

As a desktop user I never really jumped on the external storage craze. I kept a couple of terabyte drives in RAID-0 inside my chassis and there's always the multi-TB array in the lab in case I needed more storage. External drives were always neat to look at, but I never really needed any. My notebook's internal storage was always enough.

With the arrival of Sandy Bridge in notebooks however I've given the notebook as a desktop replacement thing a try. I've got enough random hardware if I need a fast gaming machine in a pinch, but for everything else I'm strictly notebook these days. As a result I've come to realize just how precious portable storage is. Most reasonably portable notebooks have one usable 2.5" bay at most (two if you don't mind sacrificing an optical drive). Network storage is great but what if you need something portable on the go with you?

I'm obviously a staunch advocate of spending your internal real estate on an SSD, but if you need the space you've gotta go mechanical for your external storage. If portability is what matters, an external 2.5" hard drive can be quite attractive as they're lightweight and can be powered over USB.

In the 2.5" world there are three predominant thicknesses available: 7mm, 9.5mm and 12.5mm. Most notebook drives are 9.5mm. You'll notice that Intel even ships many of its SSDs with a removable spacer to make them 9.5mm tall in order to maintain physical compatibility with as many notebooks as possible.

Thicker drives are needed to accommodate more platters inside, but as platter densities increase so do the capacities of thinner drives. A couple of years ago Seagate announced the world's first 7mm thick 2.5" hard drive and earlier today, it announced the thinnest external 2.5" drive: the GoFlex Slim.

STORAGE MAKER Western Digital (WD) has launched its My Book Studio Edition II 6TB external hard drive.

The 6TB drive is available now online for 9.99. WD was unavailable to comment on UK price and availability but the 2TB model is currently priced at £199.95 and the 4TB version goes for £399.95. The 6GB model supports Firewire 400 and 800, eSATA and USB 2.0 interfaces. Western Digital says that 6TB is a third more space than previously available and equates to up to 1.2 million photos, 460 hours of video or 1.5 million songs.

The hard drive is Windows and Mac ready but beware of which version you have, as it might not support the size of the drive. Mac OS X 10.5.2 and 10.6 are supported but 10.4 can only cope with a maximum of 2TB. It’s a similar story on the Microsoft side of things with the hard drive working on Windows Vista and Windows 7 but the older Windows 2000 and Windows XP versions will support only up to 2TB.

Aimed at users who demand vast amounts of space and backup functions, the dual hard drive supports RAID 0, striped, and RAID 1, mirrored, and it’s compatible with Apple’s Time Machine backup utility. It also has its own automatic backup software and a capacity usage gauge. µ

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From 4 GB to 6 GB is a 50% increase, from 6 GB to 4 GB is a 33% decrease. You’d think that people in the technology industry would have better math skills.

posted by : Anonymous, 17 March 2011 Complain about this comment 6 TB disk

Besides a typo in the order of just 1,000 I have another question:
Why dont you mention the capacity of that disk when running Linux???

Harry

posted by : Harry, 17 March 2011 Complain about this comment "drive"? no, "array"

This behemoth is nothing more than a pair of WD 3GB drives slapped together in a double-wide enclosure.
Move along, nothing to see here.

posted by : Mark, 17 March 2011 Complain about this comment still waiting

Been a week and I’m still waiting for my 6 tb to transfer over:)

posted by : Crusher, 17 March 2011 Complain about this comment More fails

The failure rate on ALL 2TB drives is 20% or so over a 1TB drive. I’m assuming the 6TB makes up for the fact that you’ll be losing 60% of it…

Oh, and stop telling us how many photos and video hours and that useless crap is. What is I want to store my uncompressed camera raws, flac videos and shittime MOV’s? I’d get 4 photos, 2 songs and a 3 second hi-def clip on that thing…

posted by : Failure, 17 March 2011 Complain about this comment If given to me, I’d sell it.

I’m on my third Western Digital "Elements" external disk drive. The original purchase failed within 60 days, and the first replacement failed within 40 days. I’ve had this one for about a week. I’m expecting that this one will fail in about a month, unless I decide to sell it at half price on Ebay.

Six TBytes? Right. So, about the time I get all of my important data copied over to it, the unit will fail. Well, I suppose that is one way to deal with excessive amounts of personal data.

Sorry, no more Western Digital drives for me, this year.

posted by : anonymous coward, 18 March 2011 Complain about this comment Most read Most commented Most watched Western Digital launches a 6TB external hard drive Android beats Iphone at web browsing Intel wins green award for low low computing power 2011 will be the year of the graphics enabled microprocessor Opera Software releases Opera 11.10 Barracuda IE9 was downloaded 2.3 million times in 24 hours Apple slaps a 0 premium on its Ipad 2 32GB US Congress will decide if video streaming is a felony Apple’s Ipad 2 rivals will fail, says analyst firm Android smartphones vulnerable to Flash Player attacks LG Optimus Pad tablet video demo

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Lawrence Latif THE INQUIRER

3TB ought to be enough for anyone