Next Generation SSDs Delayed Due To Vista

PoliTech notes in a journal entry that "Vista is the gift that just keeps on giving." "Speaking during SanDisk's second-quarter earnings conference call, Chairman and [CEO] 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... '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 this challenge alone is putting SanDisk behind schedule. "We have very good internal controller technology... That said, I'd say that we are now behind because we did not fully understand, frankly, the limitations in the Vista environment.'"

Comments

Re:Funny how Sandisk is the only one with this pro

[MojoStan]

Sandisk SSD drives are poorly made and perform poorly (much worse than others..). This is just Sandisk trying to shift the blame elsewhere..

DailyTech's article (and others) have also added opinions similar to yours. From the DT article:

• "It is quite true that SanDisk's SSD are woefully subpar in performance when running Windows Vista. Numerous benchmarks from around the web have shown SanDisk SSDs getting outpaced by the competition.

  In fact, it's not uncommon to see SanDisk SSDs rank last in testing in almost every benchmark and by a large margin -- even in Windows XP. Recent testing showed that MSI's Wind netbook was no faster with a SanDisk SATA 5000 SSD than with the standard 80GB HDD -- an Eee PC 1000h featuring similar specifications was significantly faster with a competing SSD from Samsung.

  While Vista may be a performance inhibitor compared to Windows XP for SSDs, it appears that most new, current-generation SSDs are having no problems performing well with the operating system. The problem appears to be SanDisk's low reads and writes (67 MB/sec and 50 MB/sec respectively) compared to the competition (i.e., OCZ's new Core Series SSDs which clock in at 120 to 143 MB/sec for reads and 80 to 93 MB/sec for writes)."

Re:Unbelievable

[HighFlyer]

Every time you boot into Vista, god kills a little kitten!

Re:File swapping destroys SSDs

[palumbor]

Seriously can we put this statement to bed yet? It has been several years (think, five or so) since this statement has even been slightly accurate. Yes, many writes can destroy a drive, but the number is in the (upper) hundreds of millions - performed on one single sector.

Today flash hard drives levy on technology used in older embedded devices that relied on flash, called "wear leveling".

Because each write is spread out throughout the entire disk, you don't physically write to the same sector X thousands of times when updating a cache file or whatnot.

Even if you had something thrashing the SSD continuously, you would not destroy the drive within the reasonable lifespan of a comparable rotating media drive.

SANDISK has been caught in a lie here.

[Coolhand2120]

So is SANDISK telling the lie now when they say it runs poorly or are they telling the lie then when they say it will run optimally and even provide benchmarks. No matter how you look at it, SANDISK is lying.

http://www.sandisk.com/Corporate/PressRoom/PressReleases/PressRelease.aspx?ID=3785

"The results indicate that the new Windows Vista operating system will run optimally when installed on the SanDisk SSD"

Re:Unbelievable

[4D6963]

How can this be informative?

I'm afraid some moderators have a sense of humour ;-)

Re:Unbelievable

[Cato]

Linux already runs just fine on Flash devices, and has done for many years - there are filesystems optimised for flash, and many embedded devices that use Linux on Flash, e.g. GPS devices (TomTom, Garmin), WiFi/DSL/Cable routers (most of them), etc, etc. There are also consumer distros that run really well from USB flash drives, e.g. Damn Small Linux, Slack, Puppy and many others.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Unbelievable

[ErroneousBee]

Hello, by 'reasonably modern hardware' do you mean those newfangled silent,fast SSD drive thingies? I think I read somewhere that Vista doesnt play nice with them.

Maybe you mean the latest CPUs comming out the Fabs, like the Atom and Via low power chips. I may have read a story about a hardware company (I think is was Asus) producing a low power device (the Eaaa PC?) that runs the latest Linux, but for the Windows version, they chose Windows XP over Vista for performance reasons.

Perhaps you mean new hardware designs like the Cell architecture and other SMP designs coming to a Blade Center near you. The NT base for Vista has a shitty scheduler, and appears to require 1 NIC per CPU for good performance, which is going to make 32-way CPUs rather expensive if you want to run Windows.
I was going to mock Windows for not being able to run on Cell based machines like the PS3, but it looks like somebody has managed it, pffft.