Surface Studio / Studio 2 Discussion Thread

Thank you sir. I've been doing some sketchnoting projects and the screen real estate is amazing.

 

"I have SEEN the light!" - and the plus sign.

You are a scholar and a gentleman. Many thanks.

 

UPDATE: 03May19 (**Sigh** It's always something...!)

<<...I've been doing some sketchnoting projects and the screen real estate is amazing...>>

Yeah. I get maybe 5 minutes a month to sit in front of our Studio 2... because I'm backing the drive up... and the screen size and resolution never fail to impress me. You'll be happy to know that since I brought it home last November, it has worked flawlessly; it appears that Microsoft has successfully addressed the gremlins that plagued the original Studio design. However, I'm still happy that I signed up for Microsoft Complete!

Having said that, I now have to admit to a mea culpa...

<<...During the the recovery efforts, I noticed that the 1TB D: drive was grayed out in My PC. Exploring further in Storage Manager, the D: volume was reported as "No media (present)." A few other checks seemed to indicate that the D: drive was completely unresponsive... i.e., dead...>>

To make a long story short, I was mistaken. The Studio 2 is running perfectly and as intended. My confusion stemmed from two things. 1) I thought that the Studio 2 had two installed drives, C: and D:. During my conversation with Microsoft Support, there was some confusion. I understood the Tech to say that the C: Drive was two hardware volumes (which I reported here) but upon some reflection, I decided to look into that some more. This time, though, I looked at Device Manager. Our (I use that term loosely) Studio 2 has a single 1 TB Toshiba SSD, KXG50ZNV1T02 NVMe PCIe 3 "super fast." I didn't question the Tech at the time because I was still thinking about two drives. However, it was the second thing that I was focused on and that really had me confused... 2) My wife uses an HP Officejet Pro. It's connected to the Studio 2 via USB, of course. However, when it's connected, it shows up in This PC with a drive letter (D)! This is unlike any other peripheral device in my experience (except, of course, data drives). When you double-click the D icon, it says "please insert media." Suffice to say that it took about an hour on the phone with Microsoft Support before we discovered this peculiarity! Once it was apparent, everything seemed to make sense...

So all's well after all. I'm actually glad that it was my mistake and not an actual hardware fault; the Studio 2 is no fun to lug around...!

 

Ditto

 

New GPU updates!

https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-rolls-out-new-gpu-driver-updates-to-the-surface-studio-lineup

(Courtesy of NeoWin site)

 

Kickstarter developer offers a low cost clone:

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbre...-4k-surface-studio-clone-kickstarter-hands-on

(Courtesy of theVerge site)

...A side comment, here. I can't say how impressed I am with the Studio 2 in terms of the user experience; it's literally the most unique and immersive platform in the house... and we have a lot of platforms! You sit down, and it just sucks you in...

 

It is THE single device that I couldn't give up, no matter how fragile it was. My warranty ran out last month, but it seems that Microsoft will still service it at $400-500 expense out of warranty - so at least I won't have to worry that it'll turn into a useless rock in the near future. My last replacement has been solid for half a year so far - aside from an annoying constant electric noise. Knowing how fragile the touch digitizer was, I refrained myself from replacing it. Finger crossed if this replacement could survive for a full year. [For those of you who don't know, this is my sixth or seventh replacement, so I could not recommend the original Studio unless you are already wedded to it like me. It is promising that the Studio 2 has been solid for our @Steve S - I am looking forward to MS's future offerings, especially the rumored Studio monitor in 2020].

For those of you who are wondering about SSD replacement, I replaced the M.2 with a Samsung EVO 970 Plus (rated 3500mb/3300mb/s read/write). Be warned that not all M.2 are compatible with the Studio 1's hybrid setup, which requires a SSD that is supported by the generic Microsoft NVME driver. I tried the ADATA XPG XS8200 PRO, which was totally not recognized by the Studio. So far, from all sources from the Internet, Samsung drives (EVO or PRO series) are your best bet (most likely because they are compatible with MS's generic driver). The SSD upgrade is night and day difference on the original Studio. In the old Studio, the bottleneck is always the hard drive and the system would slow to a halt before the memory usage could even go above 16GB. Now I can easily cruise the memory usage to 26GB+ (running multiple VMs) without any signs of slowing down. All hail to Sammy's SSD supremacy!

Screenshot of benchmark on the upgraded SSD (1TB Samsung EVO 970 Plus) -

 

One more PS: The Studio 2 is now a year old. During that year, it has worked flawlessly. I thought at one point that I had a hard drive issue, but it turned out to be a mistaken impression on my part caused in part by an HP printer that for some reason wanted to show up as a hard drive in the hardware list. Weird.

ANYWAY, my point is that whatever problems Microsoft had with the original Studio have been fixed. The Studio 2 is expensive, but if you're thinking about buying one, hardware failures shouldn't be a concern...

 

This is very interesting - I just copied a 2GB file from the SSD to the HDD in 1-2 seconds! How was that possible?

For those who don't know, I upgraded the 128GB SSD in my 1st gen Studio to a 1TB SDD, and used the 1TB SSD as my system drive, leaving the 2TB HDD as my data drive. In theory, the HDD is not cached by the SSD as the SSD is used in its full capacity as a separate drive (no cache partition, no Intel RST setup, etc). However, it appears that the 5400RPM HDD is fully cached by the SSD (i.e. feels very snappy, plus the super speedy file transfer performance that should be impossible on a HDD?!). I tested again with a lot more files - yep, it is cached!

What kind of magic is that?

My theory is that Microsoft's firmware automatically uses the SSD's cache (since it's the new 970 EVO Plus, which has a 6GB super speed SLC cache and 42GB cache in total) to cache the HDD. I know you can use a SSD to cache a HDD (e.g. through Intel RST), but I have never heard that you can use a SSD's cache to cache a HDD. It's as if the SSD's cache is not used to itself only, but is shared across the system?! That sounds like some next level magic stuff, but in theory it is definitely possible. Most SSD's performance drops to SATA level after the cache is used up, and in my case, I suspect that the HDD's performance will return to normal after it writes 40GB of cache data...

 

An update for the Studio 2:

https://www.neowin.net/news/surface-studio-2-update-now-rolling-out-with-new-display-driver-and-more

(Courtesy of NeoWin site)