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[sonycowboy]

10.06.2004, 04:08 PM

Japan's Sony Corp. will begin selling a computer and home-server system in Japan with 1,000 gigabytes of hard-drive storage - enough to record six TV channels for a week straight - the company said.

Vaio Type X, set to go on sale Nov. 20, will sell for about $4,700, Sony spokesman Shinji Obana said Wednesday.

"The best part is that you can freely choose what you want to watch without having to worry about what you might have missed," he said.

There are no plans to market the computer overseas, Obana said.

Recorded programs are displayed as a thumbnail TV guide that Sony calls Time Machine View. The shows can also be grouped by categories such as sports or sitcoms, Sony said.

The machine has six analog TV tuners that can record six channels at once for a week at 19 hours of programming a day, or five and a half days of continuous recording. It also has a regular personal computer tuner for recording a seventh channel.

The oldest recordings are automatically deleted unless they are saved to make room for new recordings.

The Vaio Type X is on display at the CEATEC electronics show this week in Chiba, a Tokyo suburb.

 

[mrklaw]

now let it broadcast over the internet, and I'll buy my inlaws one for christmas..

 

[goodcow]

How long is a hard drive writing at least six megs a second, 24/7, going to last? A year?

 

[sonycowboy]

How long is a hard drive writing at least six megs a second, 24/7, going to last? A year?

I think the point was to let people know how many hours total could be recorded, not as an expectation of usage.

 

[Fowler]

What that post doesn't mention is that the terabyte is divided into 500GB for the DVR side and 500GB for the PC side, so it's not really a 1TB DVR...

 

[B'z-chan]

Wow Solid State HDD's already in consumer computers?!?!?!

 

[DarienA]

What that post doesn't mention is that the terabyte is divided into 500GB for the DVR side and 500GB for the PC side, so it's not really a 1TB DVR...

That's because for some reason Sonycowboy picked a shitty article to quote:

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,118050,00.asp

HIBA, JAPAN -- Sony will begin selling in Japan in November a combination personal computer and video server that can record up to seven channels of television simultaneously, it said at the Ceatec 2004 exhibition here.

The Vaio VGX-X90P goes on sale in Japan on November 20 and will cost around $4727.

To understand the Vaio X computer it's best to think of it as three things packed into one black, shiny box.

On one side it's a multimedia personal computer, with two 250GB hard drives and a television tuner. Users can do all the normal things they would with one of the company's Vaio computers including recording television programs from a single analog channel or, via an optional unit, a digital TV channel.

Also packed into its tower-PC sized case are two video server boards. Each unit contains three analog TV tuners and is connected to a 250GB hard drive. The unit runs on the Micro iTron operating system and the interface with the rest of the PC is via an Ethernet port, says Junji Tsuyuki, a senior product producer at Sony's IT and mobile solutions network department.

Simultaneous Recording

The three analog tuners mean it's possible to record three channels at once and because there are two server boards this rises to six channels simultaneously, says Tsuyuki. With the tuner from the PC side of the device also added, a user can record seven channels at the same time although the focus of the device is continuous, simultaneous recording of six programs via the dual video servers.

That works out well for the company's target audience of consumers because most areas of Japan are served by two public television channels and between three and five commercial TV networks.

The 250GB hard drive space is enough to store five and a half days worth of programming from each of the three channels assuming continuous recording, or one week's worth of programs assuming 19 hours per day of TV per channel, Tsuyuki says. What's more, users can specify 400GB drives for the video server units when they order the Vaio X. This would raise its total storage capacity from 1TB to 1.3TB.

Users can bring up a grid-like electronic programming guide screen that, instead of looking forward, contains the past few days of television. Then, at the press of a button, any program can be watched on demand--a function Sony likens to a time machine.

"In America, TiVo is very famous but we don't have it in Japan," says Tsuyuki. "This is a kind of TiVo for Japanese users."

Sony has licensed technology from TiVo and also holds a stake in the Alviso, California, company but none of the company's technology was incorporated into the Vaio X, says Tsuyuki.

 

[teh_pwn]

And it'll probably have like a X300 Pro and be way overpriced...

This is nothing ground breaking.

The PC I built has 6 SATA ports (4 capable of SATA2/NCQ) and 8 USB 2.0 connections. I could easily break 1 Terra with a few HDDs.

 

[DarienA]

And it'll probably have like a X300 Pro and be way overpriced...

This is nothing ground breaking.

The PC I built has 6 SATA ports (4 capable of SATA2/NCQ) and 8 USB 2.0 connections. I could easily break 1 Terra with a few HDDs.

and if you read the articles you'll see that it wasn't built to be ground breaking...

 

[teh_pwn]

Well it was posted here as if it were something new, but I could easily go to newegg and buy six 400 GB SATA drives, and a bunch of USB2.0 HDDs and have over 4000 GB of storage.

Sony's PCs are bad even by prebuilt standards. They typically use low end video cards, micro-ATX mobos, extremely small cases, pathetic speakers with the integrated audio to go with it. And they charge so much for it.

If I'm missing something here, I'm sorry.