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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.'"
TFA doesn't go into much detail - by "not optimized" do they mean that Vista pages frequently, and thus would wear out the SSD rapidly? Or is it possibly something to do with sustained read speeds?
It greatly upsets me that they view this as a question of optimization.
Seek speed is nice, but it's only one aspect of SSD technology. Heat is another, and for a large segment of us the noise generated is the dominant feature. The HD is the only piece of the machine standing in the way of silent operation, and unlike power use or speed that's something that can affect the owner all day long even when they're not actually using the machine.
Holding up silent drives because they aren't quite fast enough is just disheartening. :-( I'm guessing for others, holding up cooler drives is equally sad.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
The interesting thing is the Ingo Molnar has said outright that none of the current Linux filesystems is GOOD ENOUGH for SSD's - he has his hopes on BTRFS to save us in the longer run - and the Linux filesystems are a damn-sight better at it than Vista...
Intriguing how Linux was already the best, and yet working on improvement when the competition hasn't even considered the problem yet.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Sandisk SSD drives are poorly made and perform poorly (much worse than others..). This is just Sandisk trying to shift the blame elsewhere..
I am the maverick of Slashdot
On my Thinkpad X60, Vista reduced the run time by at least an hour, until I disabled the damn disk indexing crap (and it's still shorter -- I'll move back to XP when I decide to quit being lazy).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I upgraded my computer at the time from XP to Vista, and once Superfetch learned what programs I used a lot, I noticed programs like Firefox and Visual Studio loaded significantly faster than under XP.
Also, by default Vista doesn't index files as fast/at all when a laptop is on battery, so this affect the battery life of a laptop. I don't know how XP and Vista actually compare on power consumption, but your example isn't what will make a difference.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
They did intend to change the filesystem when designing Vista, to WinFS. WinFS turned out to stink for a lot of reasons, and seems to have quietly vanished off the product release schedule. This is a good thing: WinFS is XML based and apparently severely patent encumbered, and would mean a nightmare writing and publishing new drivers for Linux and other OS's that can comfortably read and write FAT32 and NTFS now.
Vista is not optimized for flash memory solid state disk
FALSE.
Vista is not optimized for ANY Hard Drive in existence today.
Like Crysis, it can bring any system down to its knees.
Throw a seagate barracuda @ 7200 RPM and 16MB cache at it and it will slow down the disk.
Throw a WD Caviar black with a 32 MB cache, and it will slow down the disk.
Hell, for fcuk's sake if i use a RAM Disk with 64-bit Vista and a 10 GB RAM disk as non-system disk, it will slow down even RAM by superfetching its crap.
Any software that does not run on current hardware is not worth buying.
Mac OS X Leopard runs on my iBook G4 768MB RAM. I upgraded from Tiger and found Leopard actually is faster. (same was case when i moved from Panther to Tiger).
Hmmm... when will Microsoft learn that upgrading an OS should NOT slow down an existing system.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
My immediate impression is this is somebody trying to blame M$ for their own failings.
How well does this work on Linux (with the various filesystems) and OS/X? Is Vista really doing something stupid, or is it being blamed for the same mistake as everybody else? What about XP?
Other thing is I remember the disk-thrashing bug in Linux Ubuntu. I have it and have to run a startup program to turn off the hard disk power savings to stop the head-park every half second. I did a lot of searching of the web, looking for an explanation of why XP works, and the only real experiments I found indicated that XP just kept reading the disk, so often that it *never* parked the heads. Thus Linux's reduced (but non-zero) use of the disk made things worse. All other tests seemed to indicate they left the power saving settings the same and I never saw any other explanation. This does sound like it might be related to the SSD problems, but those tests were certainly with XP and not Vista-only. Anybody know anything about this?
The interesting thing is the Ingo Molnar has said outright that none of the current Linux filesystems is GOOD ENOUGH for SSD's - he has his hopes on BTRFS to save us in the longer run -
Precisely. Linux WILL have a fix soon, and it will be incorporated into all the major distros at the next release.
When are we going to see a MS filesystem that doesn't suck? (Alright, I thought about it. Make one with a BSD licence...)
6GB, are you kidding?! I consider 18GB the bare minimum for JUST THE VISTA OS PARTITION. That's with my Program Files, Users, and ProgramData directories moved to a separate partition and linked into the C drive using NTFS junctions. I learned this the hard way when I decided I wanted separation of Applications from OS data. Basically, the Windows directory itself (particularly WinSXS) starts to build up DLLs and other cruft faster than you can imagine and expands to many gigabytes. Not to mention the applications that just INSIST on filling up your C drive with their crap hidden in various places you wouldn't expect. Oh yeah, and every single freaking windows update is stored in WinSXS and CAN NEVER BE DELETED. WinSXS and every program and system file that the updates act upon MUST be located on the same physical volume or Windows Update will error out. In the end, I decided it's a huge pain in the ass to attempt to organize Windows and it is not really worth it if you have a big enough hard drive to just make a huge (100GB+) C partition. I really can't understand how someone could possibly succeed at running Vista on 4GB, or why they would even think that's a good idea.
"no apparent reason"? Firstly, Vista does not trash the hard disk at random times. A majority of the time, if no other program is requesting access, the drive stays idle. When it does do something, it's building the search index, building a restore point, ect.
You can either use the Performance Monitor included with Vista, or download one of Mark Russinovich's wonderful tools to determine exactly what the disk activity is, if you think it's a problem.
I'd bet hand over fist, 9 out of 10 trolls bitching about disk usage actually have a 3rd party program doing the thrashing, but again, for the lazy mind it's just best to bash Microsoft.
My experiences with Vista have been largely underwhelming, at best(and yes, this was on new, Vista compatible hardware, purchased with Vista. Family unit needed a new computer with some sort of bare metal to win32 layer, at the time it would have cost 50ish more to get XP, don't laugh, please). However, I find my credulity rather painfully strained by SanDisk's whining.
Unless there is some fairly subtle malinteraction between Vista and one or more SSD chipset, I have difficulty imagining what sort of pathological interaction there could be that wouldn't also create massive havoc for platter HDD setups(which are by far the majority). SSDs lag behind HDDs a bit for long, continuous read or write operations; but absolutely clean up at scattered read/write. A pattern weird enough to give SSDs real trouble would thrash the daylights out of an HDD setup. At worst, one might expect to see naive optimization for HDDs underusing the SSD's talent for ignoring fragmentation; but that wouldn't be a performance crisis. I'm the first to admit that Vista is pretty unimpressive; but my eyebrows are migrating north on this one.
I don't understand why a machine whose diagnostic app from the OS vendor lists 2.3 GB of free (available) RAM is relying on hard disk-based virtual memory for basic tasks
Looking at the system memory tab of activity monitor, do you see pages in / out increase drastically while you have lots of free memory? Do you actually see swap file usage?
Info regarding OS X paging.
It's not "bull". Microsoft fundamentally changed the storage architecture in Vista, making it very wasteful in many respects (battery life, CPU usage, drive thrashing). This *might* have been worthwhile if it offered a significant performance increase, but it doesn't. XP's storage architecture is better in almost every way when it comes to real-world usage.
The main problem is that MS is very secretive about proprietary code in their driver stacks, including storage & file system. You can't really blame SSD manufacturers for MS's complete lack of documentation.
Maybe they should just wait 6 years after they were planning to release an OS and then release it. I didn't use Windows XP until about 2 years ago because I finally started running into programs that didn't work right in Win 2000, and I had a computer fast enough to deal with it.
Beyond that, I saw a recent benchmark showing a new OCZ drive blowing all the rest of the current SSD out of the water in terms of power consumption and performance. Not only that, I believe it was faster than most current hard disks. It the very least it improved the performace/power drain by a factor of ten.
So if it is a Vista problem, it can obviously be worked around. Which makes me think that SanDisk either:
a) Can't make good flash memory at all and are trying to cover for it by blaming the popular scapegoat
or
b) Didn't do their homework and built their product to run in lab perfect scenarios instead the real world and ended up with a bad product.
Unfortunately, this time its true. We all know how SSDs will wear out over time, we all know how they'll last for 10+ years in normal usage too so its not much of an issue.
However, I run Vista at home, and I find that even with searching turned off, the HDD light is pretty much on all the time, except when I close an app that's used a lot of RAM whereupon it starts thrashing away for a good minute. I expect its readyboost kicking in and re-organising my drive so that app will start up faster next time, but that kind of usage will destroy a SSD in short order.
If the access times for SSDs aren't as good as expected for HDDs, then I expect performance woudl suffer dramatically too.
In this case, SSDs have a certain niche where they provide benefits, but Vista doesn't lend itself to that niche. The trouble the /. crowd has (besides, the usual MS antipathy) is that you'd expect an OS not to thrash the disc quite so much. If the promise of SSD persuades OS manufacturers to improve the way they use the disc (which would give benefits in energy use and overall performance) then it can only be a good thing so I welcome the Vista bashing this time.
Oh, but no-one is attacking MS here - you'll see lots of comments that its all fine on XP - the problem lies with Vista.
Actually, for constant usage some SSDs can use more power than a HD. I would expect any SSD to beat HDDs on power for infrequent use and random access times though, because they don't have to spin up before they can be read from, and don't have to be kept spinning in case of future reads.
which is totally what she said
I would understand that a certain file system would not be optimized for a certain type of media like SSD, but how can a modern operating system be that much hardware dependant?
A logical first step would be to decouple the OS from the file system; and then some day to take advantage of improvements like ZFS...
Yeah, this was what I noticed the very first time I had started using Vista.
To clarify, the reason for most of it is at least threefold:
SuperFetch, Windows Search Indexing, NTFS Defrag.
I've found that disabling these will cut down on disk access significantly. Especially SuperFetch seem to be a big culprit -- it's "intelligently" loading files to RAM (pretty much any file, not just executables) if it thinks it's about to be used this time of day. For everything but the most regular computer usage patterns, you see how ridiculous of an idea that is. 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 can think of dozens of cases where that prefetcher will be wrong, and I'll prefer saving my hard drive life time in that case.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Requires big beefy CPUs and wastes cycles on DRM and other assorted nonsense? Check.
DRM isn't an issue when it comes to CPU utilisation. Especially when you aren't watching anything DRM'ed.
Constantly "optimizes" the disk in background, thereby disabling a power-saving measure? Check.
Well, you got that one right. The optimisation engine is awful, it keeps preloading some DVD ISO's into RAM (6GB worth) and I only have 2GB RAM, so it's obviously overwriting a large chunk of the stuff it just preloaded.
I used Vista for a while. I didn't experience any crash, as far as I recall.
But it also happens to be quite resource-hungry, and the interface is (still) terrible.
Circumcision is child abuse.
I have been noticing a very organized Microsoft astroturfing effort myself. If I most anything that is derogatory to Microsoft, it is modded down instantly. No matter if the content is a well thought out point, or just an M$ joke, the Microsoft shills seem to swoop in.
At first I thought it was just some fanboys, however it is to quick, and far to thorough.
I wonder if other here have seen this also?
Cheers
* Carthago Delenda Est *
1. Static wear levelling/leveling rotate the blocks being written to so both "empty" and "full" blocks are being used, so the amount of free space on the filesystem doesn't matter.
True. Unfortunately, some SSDs don't even implement dynamic wear leveling, and static wear leveling is considered more complex to implement - and so most SSD manufacturers don't implement it!
2. The 100.000 writes often quoted are a guaranteed statistical _minimum_, not a average or a maximum. According to some sources the typical cell will endure 200K-1M writes.
I thought I was careful enough to point out the difference between MLC and SLC Flash RAM. And MLC has an upper limit of 10.000 writes (the more honest vendors put it at 5000). And MLC is far more used in SSDs, than SLC. Sadly.
3. A typical SSD has spare blocks (just as HDD have spare blocks). So when a block is toast it is just marked as "bad" and a spare block is used instead.
Which in no wise different from having, say, a 1% (actually, spare blocks are much less than that) more of free space and using dynamic wear leveling. Those spare blocks change very little in the numbers considered here.
I am disappointed that you use a totally arbitrary number of write/erase cycles (500.000) to support your argument, when the most popular Flash RAM type by far only supports 5000 to 10.000.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
He's got a point. Vista even introduces that "Dreamscape" stuff where the screensaver draws off your graphics card to do 3D rendering the entire time you're away.
It even moves the shutdown button elsewhere and put a standby button in its place.
Negligible for each PC but adds up to a lot of unnecessary power draw.