This is an interesting development. The latest Vaios leaked out a little while ago, and for the most part they were what one would expect: improved performance, better battery life, that sort of thing. But there’s an interesting feature that wasn’t on the leaked spec list (and isn’t confirmed to be, either): a “quad” SSD composed of four SSD drives working together in RAID 0. If the chipset and other hardware are designed with something like this in mind, it really could be extremely fast.
Of course it’d be fast whether they designed for it or not, but if they made sure to have the right motherboard, fast RAM, special storage controllers and so on, it could blow away the competition. Laptop had drives are traditionally low-power 5400RPM HDDs, though SSDs are becoming more common, and this multiple SSD setup could be the next step in luxury mobile computing.
It’s unclear whether the “64GB/128GB x 4” quoted is, for instance, four 32GB drives making up 128GB or four 128GB drives making up 512GB. I’d lean towards the former, since the latter would be incredibly expensive. Sure, SSDs are already expensive, but four high-capacity drives would put the raw storage cost at over $1500.