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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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.
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
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 *
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.