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

Unbelievable

[clang_jangle]

It seems hardly a day goes by without seeing yet another example of Microsoft's utter disregard for the needs and desires of virtually every market -- consumer, enterprise, and OEM. Rarely in the history of American business has any company shot themselves in the foot in such a spectacular manner, earning the ire of so many. I almost feel sorry for them. They really need to regain some sense regarding Win7, bring back the MinWin idea and use a good, transparent virtualization scheme for backwards compatability. Otherwise I think they will be pretty well finished in the OS market. The OEMs are not going down with them if they can help it, you can be sure of that. And once Windows is no longer the defacto preloaded OS it's all over.

Re:Unbelievable

[LackThereof]

They really need to [...] use a good, transparent virtualization scheme for backwards compatability.

Yes, THIS. Running legacy apps in a virtualized 2k/xp environment so they can get a clean start without worrying about backwards compatibility and all the bullshit that comes with it. Hardware is plenty powerful enough to do it, these days.

Re:Unbelievable

[Tx]

It seems hardly a day goes by without seeing yet another example of Microsoft's utter disregard for the needs and desires of virtually every market -- consumer, enterprise, and OEM

Much as I love Microsoft bashing, this is bull. The SSD manufacturers are moving their products into a market dominated by an established technology, namely hard disks, and it's up to them to make their products perform well enough to displace that established technology. Running well on SSDs wasn't a design goal of Vista, and AFAICS there is a limit to what Microsoft can do about this in the short term. I'm sure this will be on the radar for the next version of Windows, but at the moment I would say the SSD manufacturers need to work on their products rather than casting blame.

Re:Unbelievable

[countvlad]

Your first line is pretty trollish, but I agree with some of the points you make later. But first... Are you actually naive enough to buy this "our sales and performance are bad because Vista isn't optimized, omg!" bullshit? Do you think XP, OSX, and for that matter, Linux, are generally "optimized for SSDs"? This is a plea to investors and market analysts, saying "look, it's not our fault our numbers suck...it's Vista! Blame them!" It's a little after the fact to be blaming Vista on your shitty performance - Vista has been around long enough for them to get their act together. I remember the backlash when XP became mainstream and MSFT was everyone's favorite whipping boy because "Windows 98SE had better performance" and "Windows 2000 doesn't have a playskool theme." Now everyone swears by XP. Not that Vista is a fantastic or even decent OS - but it's become everyone's favorite whipping boy, the George Bush of the technology industry, and it's more than a little retarded. I'd like to see MSFT bring modularity and optionality to more of it's core components (read: remove IE and WMP). And they absolutely should leverage their Hypervisor tech, using it as a foundation for backwards compatibility - how great would it be to be able to run your legacy apps in a well-hidden (previous) Windows virtual machine? But the fact of the matter is, MSFT has the tech world by the balls, and the day when "openoffice experience" and "Microsoft Office experience" are equivalent on a secretaries resume are a long, long way off.

Re:Unbelievable

[purpledinoz]

Seriously, how could the SSD manufacturers not know that one of Vista requirements were: Thrash the hard disk for no reason at some random point in time yielding no apparent benefits.

Re:Unbelievable

[danwat1234]

How in the world did you fit Vista in a 4GB space? Usually clean installs are 6GB+!

Re:Unbelievable

[Achromatic1978]

Yeah, I had to laugh at this, what a fucking joke. "We are moving from building SSDs for primarily digital cameras which, less face it, have pretty low IO requirements, other than burst write rates on higher megapixel models, to computers using them as their primary drives with heavy read-write IO. Accordingly, we're going to blame the fact that our hardware wasn't designed for such a thing on the fact that OSes may perform heavy read/write".

What a travesty.

"We didn't make as much profit because SSDs are with every passing day becoming more and more of a commodity, and due to the fact that we make products on the higher end of the market than the $10/gb K-mart crap (i.e. Ultra and Extreme product lines)". Far more accurate.

Slashdot isn't much better, "Ooh, look, `nother chance to slap Vista for max page views and ad revenue, jump on it!"

Re:Unbelievable

[TheLink]

I actually tried reading the article to try to find out what it is that Vista does wrong that the other O/Ses (like Windows XP, OSX, Linux) don't.

And guess what, the article is crap. No details.

Of course Vista isn't optimized for SSDs, why should it have been? Is Windows XP optimized for SSDs? The only thing related difference I can see is Vista has a larger footprint.

To me it looks like they're casting blame (while trying to get their tech up to speed).

Vista is crap. But "Next Gen SSDs Delayed Due To Vista" sounds like bullshit to me.

Re:Unbelievable

[Sky Cry]

Hardware is plenty powerful enough to do it, these days.

Not once you get Vista running on it.

Re:Unbelievable

[szo]

Why? It's true!

Re:Unbelievable

[strelitsa]

I swear at Tourette's patients.

(And if any post cried out to be modded Redundant, this would be the one).

Re:Unbelievable

[LLKrisJ]

Hardly a day seems to go by without some unfounded Vista bashing going on somewhere on the planet.

Where are the numbers to back up the claims?? Would it really be so hard to more precisely describe said "highly demanding applications"???

I could go on all day.

My Copy of Vista 64 has a stability index of 10 on my simple XPS1330 notebook and it's powered up 18 hours a day. The only thing that ever brought it down were Acrobat.exe and mfetdik.sys after a resume from hibernate. Go figure...

Come up with cold hard facts of shut up, that's what I say.

Re:Unbelievable

[WgT2]

...yet another example of Microsoft's utter disregard...

I'm not so sure this isn't more of an issue of their incompetence: they aren't good enough to intentionally be this bad solely on the merit of disregard. It's because they are bad at design that their product is bad and, because of their monopoly, they can continue to be this bad.

SanDisk, too, is coming off as incompetent: here they have a chance to drive Microsoft by offering a better product that, it seems, only Microsoft cannot take a advantage of. Instead of shaming Microsoft to fix what's broken, whether with Vista or with whatever is next, they instead dumb down their product for Vista and thus submit themselves to Microsoft's hegemony.

Re:Unbelievable

[Gryll]

I decided to start disabling that system service after I had noticed it was trying to cache an incomplete ~100 MB file that was being downloaded by a P2P application to RAM. WTF, I was never going to open that file until it was done!

I would have to disagree. Unless you are leaching 100% the P2P program would need to access the entire file.

Re:Unbelievable

[Icarium]

You seem to have missed something: "These days" implies that the poster was referring to reasonably modern hardware. Trotting out a machine that is litteraly obsolete* as a case study proves nothing other than that Vista doesn't play nice on old hardware. Granted, it probably doesn't play all that nice at the lower end of modern hardware either.

*obsolete in the sense that none of the parts you mention are still being sold. You simply cannot buy a new machine with those specifications any more. Hell, the GFX card alone has been off the market for at least 4 years, and is barely comparable to even integrated GFX, never mind a cheap $50 low end card.

If you want to prove that Vista runs like a dog on reasonably modern hardware, at least use reasonably modern hardware as a reference.

Re:Unbelievable

[Gryll]

As much as I dislike Vista, I've 'downgraded' my laptop which came with Vista to XP, I can't see how this is entirely Microsoft's fault.

SSDs are new to the scene and still today are not anywhere near the commonplace. Vista has been out for a while now, how could they have optimized for SSDs and why would you spend the resources, perhaps delaying the already massively delayed OS for a niche market.

It sounds to me that SanDisk is trying to divert the blame a little. I would want my SSD to outperform a HDD under any workload no matter what OS it is running under.

SanDisk QQ and fix your product then take these dinosaur spinning disk manufacturers down.:)

Re:Unbelievable

[poot_rootbeer]

Trotting out a machine that is litteraly obsolete* as a case study proves nothing other than that Vista doesn't play nice on old hardware.

If you have to specify the definition of "obsolete" that you're using, perhaps it's not the most cromulent term to use.

Yes, up until very recently a 5-year-old piece of desktop kit would have been considered obsolete, in every sense. But today, we're at a point where that "ancient" Pentium IV with 512MB of RAM is (or should be) all the processing power the typical web surfer or spreadsheet jockey normally needs.

Hardware manufacturers' desire to keep selling more new products doesn't mean that all prior products have become functionally obsolete.

Re:Unbelievable

[Kelbear]

I'm going to keep it simple and just tell you to refresh this slashdot article, read at level 1 and start counting anti-MS posts and pro-MS posts.

At 10:10am EST I see

16 anti-MS
2 neutral: 1 post that just says "42" and this one.
0 pro-MS

Even the post you're referring to is not visible to me as it was either posted as anonymous or modded below 1.

Re:Pointing fingers

[setagllib]

It's more like Vista's disk scheduler and disk usage patterns are complete incompetent on modern hardware.

While Linux has modern filesystems and gets optimized and fixed almost constantly, Windows Vista still uses the same basic NTFS layout and associated algorithms that were finalised around 10 years ago, and weren't even very good back then. There have been only very minor revisions to NTFS and virtually none of them have improved its performance or reduced its fragmentation.

File swapping destroys SSDs

[naz404]

Flash memory has a certain "read-write" lifespan, after X thousands of reads/writes, the media becomes damaged and eventually becomes unusable.

Thus, lots of reads/writes via the swap file or web browser caches accelerate the death of Flash SSDs.

I wish newer OSes made tinier footprints and would use RAMDrives more like Damn Small Linux, thus prolonging the life of the "hard drives" of machines like the Asus EEE.

Re:File swapping destroys SSDs

[blind biker]

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.

No, this statement will not be put to bed, because it is based on facts - measured physical quantities. And here's one thing to ponder: if an application writes to the disk 100 times per second, how much will your 4GB SSD going to last? If you have only 1GB of space left, then wear leveling can only count on the blocks that don't contain data. And if the blocksize for the Flash RAM device is 128KB (which is typical, but there are also 256KB Flash RAMs), then the number of blocks you can spread out the writes is 8192. If the SSD is based on MLC Flash (as is, sadly, becoming typical) then you can write up to 10.000 times per block. Assuming perfect wear leveling, the device will last less than 819200 seconds which is 9 days and a few hours.

Doesn't look so good when under the light of rigorous analysis, is it?

You will, probably, retort with "but what application writes 100 times per second". Well, any Unix filesystem could, for example: every time a file is accessed (be it in read only), the access time is recorded - that's one write. It doesn't matter if you write 128KB, 256B or just one byte - with Flash RAM, you must rewrite the whole block. I can easily imagine a system that accesses 80 files in a second, and then does some additional logging. 100 writes per second into a storage device is nothing extraordinary.

Indeed indeed! Vista would ruin an SSD fast.

[AbRASiON]

Vista absoloutely randomly thrashes your hard disk almost constantly for the first few weeks of installation, all you can hear is tickety tick, clickety click from the damn machine.
What is it doing? I'm not sure, auto defrag? file index? superfetch? I can't be sure, what I can be sure of is that it's *apparently* meant to run at idle priority, in reality I can clearly visibly see the performance decrease of say loading firefox or nero or any application under Vista compared to XP, while the drive thrashes about like a 'special person' thrown in the deep end of a swimming pool.

I am sadly 'oldschool' I remember running DOS 5 and 6 and I recall watching my drive light, I used to be able to spot a machine with a virus purely from the damned disk activity on the machine, because it simply isn't supposed to do anything when you're not, how that has changed over the years, it's sad, even smartdrv would stop fiddling with the drive after about 5 or 10 seconds under 6.22
Win 95, 98, virus scanners, spyware detectors, 2k, XP - it's all slowly gotten worse over the years but Vista really takes the cake, I'd love to see a laptop power consumption test of XP vs Vista on an identically spec'd machine. (tickety tick, thrashity thrash)

The short story is, I agree with the article entirely, SSD's would be worn out substantially faster under Vista than previous versions of Windows.

Re:MS marketing doesnt consider it a problem

[scoot80]

How so?

Vista works fine on current hard drives, and flash based memory is historically slower than HDDs, so blaming MS for it is absurd. If they cannot develop fast enough SSDs, its their bloody fault. What you are saying is that MS should patch their software so it works with the brand new state of art SLOW hardware.

Ya, it is Vista's fault...

[TheNetAvenger]

Ok, even on SlashDot, this deserves to be bashed for what it is, instead of the we hate MS lovefest that it will probably get.

Why is this the only manufacturer that seems to be having production issues, performance issues and general reliability problems on all OSes? SanDisk is the joke of Flash in all forms, especially SSD.

Motives against Vista...

Hmm, maybe when Vista was released and 80% of the SanDisk Flash Memory failed to perform well enough to be used for Readyboost, they were a bit Pissed Off? How about the devices Vista won't even see properly because they don't meet basic USB or SD specifications, that also POed SanDisk a bit.

SanDisk also has a horrible reputation with USB Card readers, as the devices won't even work at the basic BIOS levels, and people buying them that 'only' used them in Devices were POed and returning them because they started expecting them to work in their computers now too. (Issues like can't see device, SD card, or see it as 1GB when it is a 2GB card are some of the basic problems with SanDisk SD and Flash USB devices.)

99% of all other SD/Flash brands work fine with Vista, see a pattern yet?

Ok, now on to the Vista Issue - This is where it gets borderline insane...

Vista is the only OS that has internal optimizations to work with SSD read/write array patterns. Even with as 'crappy' as the SanDisk people would like everyone to believe Vista handles SSD, Vista actually squeezes about 10-15% more performance out of a hybrid or SSD than XP or other OSes in general. (Sure there are some arguments about how MFRs implemented the SSD array controllers, and SanDisk again seems to be the odd dog out in this discussion.)

So are SanDisk's problems because of Vista or because of SanDisk's 'own' issues?

I guess everyone here should decide for themselves. A few searches on both Vista and SSD or Flash devices in general and a search or two on SanDisk should put this article in perspective.

This would be a lot less laughable if they used any excuse except Vista, the main OS to have SSD kernel level support and the only OS(Windows) to outperform XP and previous versions of NT on SSD drives.

(Be sure to check out the SanDisk demonstrations that specifically use Vista to 'show off' the performance of their drives, that even makes it more goofy.)

Newsflash

[ne0n]

Vista actually does contribute to global warming.
Requires big beefy CPUs and wastes cycles on DRM and other assorted nonsense? Check.
Constantly "optimizes" the disk in background, thereby disabling a power-saving measure? Check.

Re:Newsflash

[mvdwege]

DRM isn't an issue when it comes to CPU utilisation. Especially when you aren't watching anything DRM'ed.

Well then, please explain how Vista decides not to apply restriction to non-DRM'ed content. Be especially precise to explain how Vista does that without using magic.

Mart

Anti-Vista FUD

[Andronicus]

If Vista's not optimized for these SSDs, are you going to now tell me that an earlier version of Windows IS?

No? Right.

Vista's just fine. It's everyone's favorite punching bag, but much of the bad rap is undeserved and reactive bandwagoning.

Hardware might be further behind. Gone are the days of the heady acceleration in hardware performance found during the 98->2K and 2K->XP transitions.

I've a beefy four year-old desktop which started life in XP and now runs Vista with an experience index of 4.8. That's better than almost all the PCs offered for sale right now! That's the sad bit. The hardware isn't as stupefyingly better in so short a time now, like it was in the past.