68″ and weighing a mere 2.34lbs, the VAIO Pro 13 takes its place on the podium as the lightest 13″ ultrabook in the world. Getting away from PCIe SSD performance for just a moment, Sony has definitely put alot of time and effort into making the Haswell based Sony VAIO Pro 13 one of the best ultrabooks on the market. UPDATE: VAIO Pro 13 Native M.2 PCIe Review Posted! Later in our report, we will provide actual performance metrics and speak further on the difference between configurations. The perfomance difference between both systems is significant.
We knew this because the system we received for evaluation is SATA PCIe SSD based. Although Sony wouldn’t confirm such, we were well aware that there was no way to identify one configuration from the next.
Sony marketing confirmed to us that pre-configured models may or may not contain a SATA PCIE SSDs and that one of Canada’s VAIO Pro 13 pre-configurations contain a SATA PCIe SSD.
This situation affected us directly as the Sony VAIO Pro 13 we received from Sony was a pre-configured model and contains a SATA based PCIe SSD, actually resulting in lower performance than the previous gen mSATA configuration. We were a bit confused as Sony was clearly advertising ‘PCIe solid state drive’ in its configurations worldwide, and even stating that the PCIe ‘booted-up faster, launched apps at lightning speeds and enjoy snappier overall performance capabilities versus a traditional mSATA SSD drive’ In the case of pre-configured SATA PCIe SSD systems, this marketing is incorrect. Pre-configured configurations may use a SATA based PCIe SSD, while all custom builds use a much higher performing native PCIe SSD. Something not many people are aware of is that there are actually two physically different Sony VAIO Pro 13 ultrabook configurations being distributed, those that have been constructed for pre-configured sales and those for custom build. PRE-CONFIGURED UNITS MAY CONTAIN SLOWER SATA PCIE SSDS In fact, our first impression was such that we had already negotiated a price for retention of this ultrabook for future PCIe testing at TSSDR. Also knowing that the VAIO Pro 13 contains the Samsung XP941 PCIe SSD that we had just reviewed, we believed that this ultrabook was well on it’s way to giving the MBA a run for its money. After all, it has an IPS 1920×1080 screen, is worlds lightest 13″ ultra at only 2.37 lbs, and SSD performance of 1GB/s would qualify the VAIO Pro 13 as the worlds fastest ultra. In doing our background, we were impressed with the seemingly consistent accolades awarded to the VAIO Pro 13, many by top sites stating that this was an ‘Almost Perfect Notebook’. After looking into the VAIO Pro 13 specs a bit more closely, we felt that a definite contender had been excluded and, thanks to Sony, a VAIO Pro 13 was received for analysis not a week later. The backlash from Sony fans was amazing, many clearly noting that we hadn’t tested, or included, the new VAIO 13 Pro as a comparison system in that report…and they were right. A few weeks back, we posted an article that stated our opinion of the new Apple MBA as being one of the top ultraportable laptops available today, and quite possibly, untouchable.