SSDs have been quite the
hot topic of late, with
conflicting power usage
reports and free-falling (almost)
prices being the two angles most commonly yapped about. Now, however, we have a completely different reason to mention 'em in passing, as SanDisk's dutiful CEO let loose some questionable comments during its Q2 2008 earnings call. Noting that Windows Vista would present unique challenges for SSD manufacturers, he stated that "as soon as you get into Vista applications, you start running into very demanding applications because Vista is not optimized for flash memory solid state disk." Furthermore, he proclaimed that the "next generation controllers need to basically compensate for Vista shortfalls," and finished things up by asserting that "SSD performance in the Vista environment falls short of what the market really needs." It seems all those statements were just used to deflect blame for it being behind schedule, but we're a bit curious about how it intends on defending said statements with real-world numbers. Hmm?
posted July 22nd 2008 8:59AM
Amen, JoshL.
A lot of people are experts in the field, or (like me) wish to become one in the near future. It is very interesting to see which people are right and which are wrong in this sort of situation, because when someone is wrong, they will be debunked by someone who knows his stuff so fast that their keyboard will fry.
This kind of knowledge you can't learn from a classroom, as you are gleaning other people's experience as well as knowledge.
Vista: not optimized for use by human use
Gallery: Apple fanboy
@Galley
How would you know? You're a bloody snake.
@ mark
snake?! snaaaaake?!?! snaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaake!!!!!!!
WOW this post filled up with VISTA HATERS real fast.. Nice to see some UNBIASED opinions.lol
There is no such thing as an unbiased opinion.
@retro77: That's just your opinion.
your use of CAPS show that you're real DEFENSIVE over some arbitrary corporate product
"Hey. the shoes you produce don't fit well."
"Your feet are shaped wrong."
EXACTLY!!!!
You are all a little thick. SSD's have FAST reads and semi fast writes, but they also have a limited number of both.
VISTA is built for a regular mechanical drive, so it does things to compensate like caching pif files and buffering things in the pagefile (on the HD), all of this wastes time and performance since the SSD can read fast regardless of where the data is on the drive. The compensation which is great for old drives consumes a LOT of time for no gain on SSDs.
C-E-Oh no he didn't!
There is an interesting post in the Notebookreview.com forums today regarding defragmentation of SSD that is relevant to this topic:
See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=3643453#post3643453
Not if the speed tests are anything to go by.
It seems nothing is optimised for SSD.
Yet again, another set of Apple fanboys invade the thread, sorry, all threads Vista related, piss off and do it somewhere else, nobody likes it, it was funny back when it was first released, but not now.
Just because we do not like Vista doesn't mean we are Apple Fanboys.
I don't like Vista because they put eye candy before functionality. New kernel, new FS, new command scripting, etc... All put on hold or canceled altogether. All to release a product that was wrought with bugs so severe as to render it useless and then force use to use it.
Sure it might be "better" now. Still not up to snuff. Maybe they should take a lesson from Apple and do a "housecleaning" release. If Microsoft would deliver a "workstation" OS, no crap, no stupid widgets, no aero. Plain jane work OS. I would be the first one to be a M$ fanboy. Right now, FreeBSD and Windows XP are the workhorses.
Someone uses Windows Server 2008 as "Workstation" 2008. It works pretty well for him, other than a few program incompatibilities.
http://www.osnews.com/story/19431/Windows_Workstation_2008:_Vista_Done_Right_
@Mad Mike
Eye candy before functionality?
*Looks at OSX 10.5 before releases .1 to .4*
My word!
Not everyone love Vista, because it has problems. It's not a green OS. It's a marketing edition (ME) of Windows XP.
It thrashes hard disks constantly. You don't need numbers for that, chump.
I'll let you 12-year olds have Engadget. Perhaps you like the ignorance here, but it's tiresome for us 20-somethings.
Well aren't most (all) file-systems optimized for sequential reads? It's not just fragmenting or block size. The whole idea of having a page size for indexing files is there because it is faster to do sequential reads on a disk. SSDs change that, and it makes sense that modern software isn't yet designed with SSDs in mind.
Not everyone love Vista, because it has problems. It's not a green
OS. It's a marketing edition (ME) of Windows XP.
It thrashes hard disks constantly. You don't need numbers for that,
chump.
I'll let you 12-year olds have Engadget. Perhaps you like the
ignorance here, but it's tiresome for us 20-somethings.
The real question is:
Should we take notice of someone who is too stupid to realise there is occasionally a delay in posts registering and who therefore generates duplicate pots, especially when these posts are also factually incorrect?
I vote 'no',
The only thing Vista is optimized for is to annoy the hell out of you.
(I'm a Windows XP Pro user)
Vista is optimized for teh sucking
Can I get an amen
http://www.sandisk.com/Corporate/PressRoom/PressReleases/PressRelease.aspx?ID=3785
Sandisk said:
"The results indicate that the new Windows Vista operating system will run optimally when installed on the SanDisk SSD"
Optimizing hardware for Windows... It happens all the time the last decade...
The guy just complains that it happens again now, since everybody starts benchmarking SSDs and get "questionable" results. Or probably M$ as usually refused to include any SSD-targeted optimizations into Vista, forcing vendors to redo all the hardware.
But again, that was said from the beginning: SSDs differ too much from conventional rotating HDDs, essentially requiring new file system to be any efficient.
I suspect that ZFS will make the next version of OSX, Linux distros using it and Sun OS optimized for such drives. I doubt WinFS is going to make a comeback. So Windows antiquated way of writing virtual memory could very well be the reason. Or not? Not optimized is not the same as "acts like a beached whale." Where are the hard numbers that prove Vista is a significant problem here?
The fact that OS X only writes to larger blocks of space and doesn't drop file fragments all over the place as a matter of course might actually make it more optimized for SSDs. Though you probably couldn't say Apple made the decision because they were thinking of SSDs. At best it would be a happy coincidence.
While I agree with many technical comments here I think peple are missing the main point. The CEO was talking about SanDisk financial results and not about technical merits of different OSes. He singled out Vista not because it is less optimized for SSDs than other OSes but because it is the only OS that counts for SanDisk's bottom line. With 99% of all sold notebooks using Vista, who cares if Linux or OSX is optimized (they are not) for SSD?
Actually no Windows is 'optimized' for solid state disks. You can easily verify this by running a problem like Regmon and Filemon. Windows Vista is constantly accessing files and the registry - even where is absolutely no user activity and no obvious need. This has also been true for Windows XP and for Windows 2000 to a lesser extend. But Vista's frequency of HD reads and writes is outstanding, even for Microsofts non-standards.
Considering that Vista hit the market before SSDs came down to a price that the average person could afford. I can see why Microsoft did not write Vista to take advantage of the SSD architecture.
But that doesn't explain why other SSDs manufacturers are blowing SanDisk offerings out of the water in Vista -- oh wait it does. SanDisk's SSD suck!
I wonder how many people who trash Vista have used it for more than 30 minutes.
you could also remove "for more than 30 minutes." and there would still be a significant number that haven't.
Simple said: If you use Vista, don't use SSD Scandisk.
I guess I got to look at other brand ssd HD to replace my laptop's HD.
Uh, did you not read this thread? No current OSes are "optimized" for SSDs. All SSDs are basically the same, so it wouldn't make a difference.
Do you think SSDs will overtake the HDD market? Here's an article talking about when is it better to use HDD, flash or even both! http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=648&doc_id=155950&f_src=flffour
I suspect he's ignorantly confusing the page architecture of the x86 CPUs with what Windows is doing.
Well, SSDs aren't optmized for my wallet, so I really don't care at this point what he wants to blame on Vista. There will be no SSDs in my PCs until they are much cheaper and about 10x bigger.
in the scope of Vista's user base, SSD's make up a fraction of a percentage. SSD's are far from mainstream. SSD's may somewhat take off as an enterprise solution for corporate environments, and for server applications, Vista wouldn't even be the OS of choice anyways; see Unix, Linux, Solaris, etc.
gcc,
NTFS Journalling is not just saving a bunch of dates, the actual data changes are logged (in case your file system crashs), then those changes are applied to the files, this allows NTFS to self-repair itself after a crash, because it has a log of it's earlier actions.
Tom's second SSD test proved that the OCZ SSD is still much better than the SanDisk one, so this SanDisk muppet is just sore that OCZ are better at making SSD's than SanDisk, tough!
I find this SSD discussion quite pointless, because SSD are not affordable to most people yet and will always be much more expensive than hard disks, also better solid state technologies (without wear) are in development, and could easily replace RAM working memory, so make this discussion moot.