SillyDog701

[Antony]

SanDisk said Monday that Windows Vista is not optimized for solid-state drives, delaying the delivery of optimized drives until next year.

Speaking during SanDisk's second-quarter earnings conference call, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Eli Harari said that Windows Vista will present a special challenge for solid-state drive makers. "As soon as you get into Vista applications in notebook and desktop, you start running into very demanding applications because Vista is not optimized for flash memory solid-state disk," he said.

This is due to Vista's design. "The next generation controllers need to basically compensate for Vista shortfalls," he said.

"Unfortunately, (SSDs) performance in the Vista environment falls short of what the market really needs and that is why we need to develop the next generation, which we'll start sampling end of this year, early next year," Harari said.

Full story at SanDisk: Windows Vista not optimized for solid-state drives (Cnet News.com, 21 July 2008).

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[Don_HH2K]

Vista hasn't got a dedicated file system for flash memory; the only option to install to is NTFS, which isn't at all optimized for flash. This is why Palm came out with NVFS for their flash-based handhelds, and some distros of Linux can install to JFFS2.

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[Antony]

From what I read, it seems like Vista's file system would have negative results with solid state drive, rather than just hasn't got something ‘dedicated’ for solid state drive.

Solid state drive supposes to make file accessing faster and using less power, just not with Windows Vista.

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[Don_HH2K]

Indeed it would have negative results, and that's due to the fact that it uses a file system that's not optimized for flash memory. Whereas ATA platter-based hard drives handle writes in 512-byte chunks by default, flash memory uses something closer to 128KB chunks internally. So if you write 8K of data to an ATA hard drive, there are 16 individual IO writes to the disk.

In flash memory, since you need to write an entire cell at once, data is cached into memory, appended, and rewritten in a large 128KB chunk back to the disk. The problem comes where ATA transfers are only 512 bytes in length, so this lengthy process needs to be repeated multiple times. To my understanding, flash file systems use ATA extensions to allow for larger writes; in this case, they'd cache a full 128KB of transfers and write this once, so that no cache to memory is required before writing back to the cell.

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[richard mitnick]

I think things are a bit backwards here.

Every manufacturer of hardware and software had plenty of time to get their stuff ready for Vista.

Microsoft and Vista are catching the blame for problems that should rest with the vendors who did not do their jobs.

>>RSM

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[James]

Right on, Richard.

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[richard mitnick]

Egad, someone agrees with me.

Thanks.

>>RSM

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