Sony releases new quad hard drive laptop: Vaio Z

Sony has unleashed yet another gorgeous new laptop to keep us techies occupied on these dark winter nights.

The Vaio Z is the latest addition to the alphabet inclined Vaio family, and it should shape up to be one of the best equipped.

The specs are impressive; 6Gb RAM (upgradeable to 8Gb) is enough to cope with that powerful Intel® Core i7 under the hood. Thanks to the Intel® Turbo Boost Technology you’ll get a max clock speed of 3.33 GHz.

Despite being mighty fast, laptops with the i7’s are nothing new, so what really sets the Vaio Z apart is the hard drive. It comes with a Quad Solid State Drive (SSD) in a RAID 0 configuration.

Hard drive

Let’s break that down; quad means four and SSD is a hard drive that works like the flash memory on your USB stick or iPod. There are no moving parts so they are faster, quieter and more reliable, but they are more expensive.

SSDs also can’t store as much information, which wasn’t a problem on netbooks, but the Vaio Z’s quad arrangement now means that now you can get a laptop with a respectable 256Gb.

A RAID arrangement stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. It simply refers to a way of arranging hard drives to divide and copy data between the disks.

There are different types of RAID storage, shown by the number, and 0 means that the disks are ‘striped’ so information is distributed across them.

Sony claims that it tears through file transfers 6.2 times faster when compared with a normal computer 5400 rpm hard disk, and that “the slim, exquisitely styled new Z Series doesn’t compromise on mobility, looks, connectivity or stamina.”

Graphics

The Vaio Z also packs a surprising graphics punch. The NVIDIA® GeForce® GT330M graphics card with 1Gb of video RAM, which Sony says will make “light work of media-rich documents, presentations, movie playback and more.”

Parcelled up with a full HD 1920 x 1080 13.1 inch monitor it should prove brilliant for any visual content.

The chassis is built from carbon fibre and aluminium keeping it just below 1.45kg and 30mm thick at its chunkiest

There will be a couple of neat gadgets, including a light sensor that will automatically switch on keyboard backlighting in low light and the Dynamic Hybrid Graphics System which will save on power by switching between stamina and speed modes.

You can pre-order now, and it will be shipped from March 2010.