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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.'"
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.
Caveat Utilitor
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
For some reason 'rpm' from mandrake is surprisingly inefficient on SSD's. It makes mandrake practically unusable for me on my eeepc. Yet dpkg/apt-get/aptitude on debian and ubuntu is just zippy.
--jeffk++
ipv6 is my vpn
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.
Sam ty sig.
'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,'
Based on the statement, it earns the Vista Capable sticker...
On a serious note, I would try not to think that this is a case of -insert company- blaming MS for their own shortfall. Although I am more likely to believe that this is Vista's fault and in this case MS should be the one issuing some patches...
Driver is for supporting device abstraction layer in an OS.
If the fault is within the file system not optimizing for flash wear leveling or have frequent unnecessary writes to a device, would you suggest a hardware device vendor to make the file system too? How far in the OS do you want a 3rd party hardware vendor to work on?
An interesting concept. So you would still have 5.25" floppy drives and support a max partition size of 32GB then? After all new hardware would expect support from the OS.
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.
http://www.object404.com
"We did not fully understand the limitations of the Vista environment" - Neither did anybody else, including Microsoft... no one can be told how limited Vista is - you have to suffer it for yourself.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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.
It does too many many writes? Or it doesn't support large cluster sizes?
Or maybe it doesn't mark sectors as junk when they are no longer in use which is good for wear levelling.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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
Another way to look at it is that SSDs aren't optimized for Vista.
Here's a basic issue with NAND. NAND is most efficient when written in chunks of at least 128KB in size. Some NAND chips aren't even efficient until 256KB. Because this is the smallest unit that can be erased in NAND. If you write a smaller amount (say 8KB), it actually has to erase a new block, copy 120KB to the new block from the old, then write in the new 8KB. Then, if you write another 8KB, might have to do it again!
So these SSDs would be fastest if Vista would write in larger blocks. Unfortunately, 512B is the block size for ATA. There are extensions for 2KB, 4KB and 8KB blocks, but Vista doesn't implement them. And it doesn't have to, as they're optional.
Also notable is that even some regular magnetic hard drives now have native 2KB or 4KB blocks and it is written in 512B chunks, it might have to do a read-modify-write cycle to do it.
Anyway, if you know ATA until recently the LARGEST possible write was 128KB (256 blocks), to expect Vista to use writes this large or larger when many drives (like almost any under 137GB) doesn't even implement them is perhaps too optimistic. To expect it to use 2KB or 4KB blocks when 95% of drives don't implement them is perhaps too optimistic.
In the end, drive (including SSD) companies can't operate in a vacuum. They know they have to make what is useful for the customer, which means usable by the OS.
As an additional note, MacOS recently (10.4.something) added support for 2KB, 4KB, etc. blocks, but it still has difficulty using large writes too. I think when operating through the file system, it never generates a write larger than 256 blocks either (which is 128KB or more depending on block size).
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
When I read this, a certain quote comes to mind:
"The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool." -Unknown
So perhaps on some plane of reality we might be grateful to the good people at Microsoft for forcing SSD makers to make improvements they might not otherwise have made?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Does anyone have any benchmark comparisons between HDDs and SSDs on Linux? In fact I'd love to see a showdown of common tasks performed between the current OSes (WinXP, Vista, Server versions, Ubuntu, openSuse, Slackware etc.) on different system configurations to see who can utilize current tech best.
Also what ever happened to "Intel Turbo Memory" (which is basically an SSD "light", i.e. a miny buffer of Flash memory to cache frequently accessed files). It seems right now *only* Vista supports it, even though it is part of many notebooks nowadays and the technology was introduced nearly 3 years ago!
I really wished Linux could lead in this respect and show others how it's done. Warrios of the OS community: Vista has crippled the M$ giant momentarily, but you still have to strike him down through your own innovations!
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
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:
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)."
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
Hello,
Having read TFA, I did not see any mention of which operating systems might perform well on SanDisk's SSDs. Does anyone have a link to a transcript of their 2Q earnings conference call, or information about operating systems which perform well when paired with them?
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Dexter is a good dog.
... I did not fully understand, frankly, the limitations in the Vista environment."
Be warned, it only works once.
Unless she is also using Vista, but then dinner will be late anyway.
http://cafepress.com/spankymm - for the Masturbating Monkey in you!
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.
So basically, Vista murders your disks? Steve Ballmer should be worried. Didn't they put Hans Reiser in jail for something like this?
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
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
Vista uses the disk the way it likes, I don't see why there is this expectation that they must design their O/S around this companies products. If this was music, this thread would be filled with people telling these guys to "stop bleating about your outdated business model!!111"
Apparently that doesn't apply here, ebcause it would prevent an opportunity to rant at Micro$oft and Vi$ta.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
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.)
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...)
old does not mean bad, same as new does not mean good
What about OS X? And what is this "Vista" thing everyone is referring to?
Microsoft many years ago, bet that the trend of increasing complexity, speed and size would continue exponentially. They did not foresee that the current trend is to make things more compact and specialized.
I cant agree more. I have always been interested in OS research and concept implementations. Some of those implementations have been mindbogglingly fast, agile and stable and introduced very nice concepts like stateless computing, distributed systems and extremely fault tolerant enviroments for applications. Much of those things arent that hard to implement. Microsoft could have done it but they couldnt care less. To them good enough is whatever their monopoly can ship without being publicly tared and feathered, sometimes even worse like with Vista.
The monopoly effectivly shuts out any comercial players from entering the fray leaving only OS like Linux, BSD and such. MacOS only lives because its artificially tied to Apples hardware. The moment they release it to general PC's they will be shut down wich they know very well.
Linux isnt the right place for disruptive innovation at all because its tightly knit around *NIX, is mature and depends on an enormous amount of third party applications. Its use of an evolving development model prohibits making big changes instead of baby steps.
The biggest hindrance to any development in the computer business is Microsofts monopoly. No sane company even considers doing something that may end up competing with them no matter how much better, safer, faster or cheaper it would be.
I see todays computer world as a very conservative place where nothing really changes that much, its just the buzzwords that change. If you just look at what you can do with the computer things are very stale and not much new happens at all. Whats the real difference between Star OS, Amiga OS or GEOS and a modern OS except massive resource missuse, multitasking and a tcp/ip stack?
HTTP/1.1 400
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.
$
Hans Reiser is actually in the actor credits of the film "The Great Escape" so watch this space
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
$ blockdev --getbsz /dev/sda
4096
Remember kids, if all else fails, blame Microsoft!
No, I will not work for your startup
http://www.sandisk.com/Corporate/PressRoom/PressReleases/PressRelease.aspx?ID=3785
Yes, alright!
If your car runs slowly on the highway or out of gas - it is of course - guess what - Vista's fault! Since there is a laptop with Vista on your backseat. Turned on and optimizing!
And it disrupts your mobile phone reception, and it is - of course - the cause for you running late...
Incredibly creative management excuse!
how IT is changing the world - http://max.zamorsky.name
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.
USNG: 14TPU4605
The problem SanDisk had is they expected the OS to batch writes to an erase block size (at least 128Kb) and were surprised to find this isn't how operating systems typically work. That's not specific to Vista; it applies to every previous release of Windows, and most other mainstream OSes.
On random writes, the performance of SSDs is terrible, since they need to perform read/modify/write on every small write. So sequential write performance looks fine, and random write performance looks bad.
What filesystem guarantees to write its metadata (directories, bitmaps, etc) in 128/256Kb chunks? None do. Every time the filesystem writes a small chunk of data, the disk has to work extra hard. Any app writing small, random chunks also performs badly (eg Outlook); this is true on XP and Vista (equally.)
Really, SanDisk would have been well advised to speak to OS developers (any) before releasing their first attempt at and SSD. Experience with removable flash (typically file copies) does not equate to experience with fixed disk scenarios (eg registry & log flushes.)
Old does indeed not mean bad. But there are some issues that seem to be impossible to address without a major change in how OS works. Security, stability, predictability and resource use are nowhere to be seen in the bigger OS implementations today.
Security is an afterthought thats solved by endlessly patch defects in applications. This is something that can be solved in the OS and compiler level to a very high degree, just not with todays methods and tools.
Stability is at pretty flaky and fault tolerance at a bare minimum (i don't count bad hardware into this). One would expect a modern computer to be more stable than a Dos, CP/M or MacOS machine that has 20 years of age.
Predictability is much better in Linux than in Windows. In Linux things mostly work if done right and don't work at all if done wrong and theres rarely a gray area there. Applications is another matter where much work is needed in both the Linux and the Windows world. I should be able to do something and know it will be the same no matter how many times i do it. That means stable API's, stable input/outputs, punishing bad behavior and good fault tolerance.
Resource use is the biggest problem and probably something that affects all of the above. When doing stuff in high level languages we sacrifice control and deep knowledge for faster development. The time saved is then spent tenfold throughout the applications entire life in fixing all the little errors that went into it because of lack of both knowledge and planning.
HTTP/1.1 400
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'd say that we are now behind because we did not fully understand, frankly, the limitations in the Vista environment."
Don't sweat it buddy. A lot of us did appreciate those limitations, and Vista won't be part of our computing world any time soon. So just go ahead and optimize for Windows 7. Or Linux. Whatever.
More seriously, a question: Would the problem be the way Vista tends to hammer the main HDD so much, but the rest of the OS universe doesn't?"
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
This SSD techgnology is surely of general interest, not only for the Vista users. Why wait? Stick a button on it saying "Not Vista capable", and start selling.
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.
Intriguing how Linux was already the best, and yet working on improvement when the competition hasn't even considered the problem yet.
That's the beauty of open source. Gotta problem? Don't have to wait for someone else - you can fix it yourself. Doesn't matter if Vista has it or not - some Linux hackers want it, everyone gets it. It's proprietary software companies that have a need to be better only when there's competition. F/OSS gets better when people want it to enough to make it.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
OMG!!! on each boot?! Cats will be extinct very soon!!
Higuita
Working on improvements "just" to see one's program run better seems to be typical for Open Source projects, while the commercial competition tends to invest the man-hours only when there is an immediate need. Mostly for new features, sometimes for performance (but the latter only if customers are complaining).
I've had it made clear by my boss at work that we don't rework our programs unless there is a project for it. Which happens only when our customer are complaining, see above. Something like the repeated rewrite of the Linux scheduler, while the previous version already yields reasonable performance, would be unthinkable in this environment.
C - the footgun of programming languages
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.
I don't know if you're blatantly lying or just very misinformed.
Let's take age and revisions first. Ext2 was introduced to Linux in January 1993. NTFS was introduced to Windows in July 1993 (in NT 3.1). So your implication that NTFS is much older than ext is nonsense.
You say that there have been "only minor" revisions to NTFS in comparison to ext2. Ext2 has in fact had only one (stable) revision, ext3, and it introduced only one new feature, journalling (something NTFS has had from the start). Various new revisions of NTFS, on the other hand, have added: transparent compression, named streams, disk quotas, filesystem-level encryption, sparse files, reparse points, update sequence number journaling, $Extend, distributed link tracking, and atomic transactioning, among others.
Some of these features, such as sparse files, are things that ext2 has had from the start. But many, such as transparent compression and file-system level encryption, are not only not, but have even now not found their way into mainstream Linux. To take those two features as an example, the only filesystems even close to mainstream that have them are Resier4 and ZFS, neither of which are ready for widespread use in Linux.
You say "Vista still uses the same basic NTFS layout and associated algorithms that were finalised around 10 years ago" -- conventiently not mentioning that that that 'ten-year-old layout policy' uses a number of modern layout features, such as extents, that have also still not yet found their way into mainstream Linux (ext4 and Reiser4 both support them, but neither are yet out of beta; neither ext3 nor ReiserFS 3 do). Directory contents in NTFS, incidentally, is stored as a B+ tree, which is the same structure that ReiserFS uses due to its scalability.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
I was under the impression that WinFS was simply an SQL layer over the top of NTFS, so it'd have exactly the same storage patterns and associated troubles as normal NTFS.
I have always been interested in OS research and concept implementations ... Microsoft could have done it but they couldnt care less.
I was under the impression that MS Research does quite of a lot of "OS research and concept implementations" -- Singularity, anyone?
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
Since win95 i read about how WINFS will be released and "how good it will be"(â)... more than 10 years later is still vaporware.
in all this time all they do is keep updating the "target winfs features" and manage to do a dog slow, CPU burner FS without any real usefulness.
FS is to save files. DB is to save and manage data. FS is a special DB, just like LDAP, people dont use DB because DB is a overkill for those special cases.
For each task, a different tool but MS still didnt learn that, they like to do a "one size fits all"(â) and its one of the many reasons that people hate MS and its products.
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS "ONE SIZE FITS ALL" !!
you will always lose some features/speed/stability/usability/whatever
Higuita
No, it's still accurate, especially if you've nearly filled the flash drive to capacity: you'll be reading/writing over the same fewer blocks and the read/writes won't be spread throughout the drive.
This is pretty worrisome for netbooks that have primary flash drives that aren't replacable (EEEs, etc)
http://www.object404.com
1960's style kernels? The NT kernel is the finest and most advanced one you'll see on a desktop machine; it was written by, basically, the VMS team hired wholesale after the collapse of DEC. In NT 3.51 it was a true microkernel; things like graphics have since been merged back in for performance, which, while inelegant, is true to the scientific method - if experiment and theory disagree, it is the theory which is wrong. As for 1970's languages, .net/C# needs to be applauded for finding a way to make a modern language interoperate in both directions with traditional ones - which opens the possibility of writing even low-level system libraries in modern languages, something I've never seen any other framework offer. You'll see from my other posts that I'm far from an MS fan, but it's unfair to blame them for the excessive conservatism of the tech industry as a whole.
I am trolling
In the case of Amiga OS it had proper multitasking long before any of Microsoft's offerings.
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...
..the 'smart' flash drive technology. The problem was that Windows can only autorun from CDs, so somebody created a flash drive that pretends to have a CD partition. I thought software was supposed to work around hardware limitations, not the other way around... especially with the annoyance of autorun in itself.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
WinFS was never a file system, it was a layer that got inserted on TOP of the existing NTFS filesystem and the technology is still used by Microsoft today, just for different applications.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Vista (and NTFS) were around long before this generation of SSDs were designed.
No sig today...
Well, there were issues reading/writing to NTFS for years. Remember the captive-NTFS method, wrapping Microsoft's own driver? Then there was the big NTFS reverse-engineering project that finally provided a stable enough driver for general linux use. Don't forget that OS X can only read NTFS volumes, there is no official write support.
It would have been much better if Microsoft had simply released specifications for NTFS like they had for FAT.
Microsoft is going to make a closed filesystem, so we might as well ask for whatever benefits we can get from it. Eventually they will have to abandon NTFS, then maybe they could make something useful. Possibly ZFS-style pool volumes, I would love to setup a RAID-1 on a computer without a complete reinstall.
How does MS ass-rape me daily? Do you even understand what you're talking about?
And why would I care about old hardware? I'm running Vista on a new(ish) laptop, works perfectly fine. Doesn't sound like I'm acting special - sounds more like I'm prepared to spend money to avoid the time wasted getting Linux up to the functional standard that I'm used to in Windows.
I guess this is proof (finally!) that Microsoft stimulates innovation.
Bert
Who now thinks proof of yagolah's (in)existence is around the corner
Just because something's old doesn't mean it's bad. Besides, the difference is MAYBE a megabyte or two per second. It's a fact of life with journaling filesystems, you can't beat just plain not having to write to the journal in terms of performance. The Linux filesystems are better designed but they're not the comparative speed demons you think they are. A performance difference of ~8% is not "complete incompetent".
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yes, in ideal conditions NTFS performs close enough. In real-world use it fragments like a dropped wine glass. Performance goes right out the window when as simple a thing as a 20GB VM image is split all over the disk.
Sam ty sig.
That's the beauty of open source. Gotta problem? Don't have to wait for someone else - you can fix it yourself.
Is that why it took QUARTER OF A CENTURY to finally fix a Unix bug ?
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
Actually they can and are doing. The problem is that Sandisk can't so they're blaming Vista for their own shortcomings but it doesn't matter what OS you use as Sandisk SSDs are so shite, they're no faster than a HDD whether Windows, Linux or Mac OS X.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
"I was under the impression that MS Research does quite of a lot of "OS research and concept implementations" -- Singularity, anyone?"
Why yes, but nothing in Singularity is new. An abundance of concept OS exists but nobody implements anything from them, not even singularity. Microsoft isnt the least interested. The biggest thing they have implemented in later years is utter worthless copy protection in Vista. It must suck bad to work for Microsoft Research and see absolutely nothing tangible get out of your work.
HTTP/1.1 400
Something is wrong here ... it used to be this way:
1. Make a good hardware design
2. Write drivers for the hardware
3. Use it under the operating system of your choice
Talking about choice:
If anything, this shows that something must be seriously wrong with Vista. First, the performance shouldn't be poor to begin with, but it apparently is. Second, one should be able to fix any performance issue by writing a new driver to fix the shortcomings, which apparently is not possible.
Another good reason not to buy or use Vista (as if there weren't enough already).
Btw, the last MS-Windows machine in my home was reformatted four weeks ago and now leads a happy life as a Linux machine.
"When doing stuff in high level languages we sacrifice control and deep knowledge for faster development."
but you also gain portability. I like writing smallish programs in c then looking at the assembly output from the compiler on different architechtures, only to try and find where I can improve it etc. the resulting program usually winds up using nothing but system calls to the kernel.
while that's cool for small programs, writing say kde or gnome in assembly would be crazy, especially trying to write the same thing in x architechtures
people can write in high level languages while knowing what is happening underneath, all good programmers should
Please explain why you would make a swap drive out of RAM?
Oh how I wish I had mod points.
"I realise this is not a very popular opinion but it's the truth, and there for needs to be said" -Bill Hicks
Toms did a benchmark in Windows Server 2003 which showed the Sandisk drive to be severely lagging. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hdd-battery,1955-7.html
Yeah, I thought the same thing when I saw this. SanDisk's original SSDs were already being blown away by other first-gen SSDs, and every new one that comes out just makes them look even worse. Vista is just a convenient (and popular) whipping boy.
Just a thought: Could a disk IO scheduler detect transfer speed and seek times and optimize itself to compensate/alleviate any problems?
This would be very good not only for different storage mediums (magnetic disks, optical disks, tape, SSDs, memory, network-attached-whatever...)
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
I'm saying you don't have a 10GB RAM disk, and your assertion that Vista makes RAM run poorly is pure conjecture. Let's say you somehow made a 10GB RAM disk, ignoring for the moment that you would have no RAM to run system, why you would go about installing any programs on a RAM disk is really amazingly stupid, the moment you restarted your computer the program would be annaliated.
That's "annihilated".
My i-RAM doesn't have that problem.
But you don't even need a battery backed SATA RAM drive to make a RAM disk that survives reboots. The Amiga Recoverable RAM Disk (RRD.DEVICE) hooked into the hardware boot vectors and did an integrity check at start, and so long as you hadn't lost power it would re-install itself with all its contents intact. You could even use it as your boot disk.
I can't run Vista on my machine because it's ultra bright hdd led would be permanently stressing me out of bed...
Use Linux for it, and while developing, make the necessary modifications to the kernel to make it work.
Unless your working set is larger than your physical RAM, you shouldn't need a pagefile or swap partition at all. I routinely run UNIX based servers with no swap partition, because I know the maximum working set is much smaller than the available RAM.
I remember being puzzled by this on early versions of NT, but I figured Microsoft would eventually get around to fixing this obvious bug. Can someone explain exactly what their logic is?
Oh, and why does NTFS need to be defragmented? Building a file system that avoids fragmentation problems is not rocket science.
Glad you posted, I was just checking someone had brought up the OCZ gear.
As soon as I saw the sandisk comment on other sites I was wondering how they'd care to comment about the OCZ SSD's superior performance on the tomshardware test ( http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hdd-battery,1955.html ). It thoroughly trounces all of the competition.
This was due mostly to the real SATA II controler, rather than a SATA bridge.
Vista is not at fault here, sub par interfaces are, time to use real hardware SanDisk.
Such a striking shame compared to Sandisk being the only company who's Compact Flash cards seem to actually perform DMA transfer properly.
In related news, other companies are moving forward with MLC SSD despite this. Users of other platforms won't have to wait unless they have some undying loyalty to San Disk. http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/07/22/sandisk.on.vista.and.ssds/
I would have to disagree. Unless you are leaching 100% the P2P program would need to access the entire file.
But that's not quite right. Generally what P2P apps seem to do is allocate a block the size of the entire file (since they could write anywhere into it from the start). So that means Superfetch is placing the WHOLE 100mb of file into memory, even when you only have 2k of actual file blocks downloaded and stored!!! That's many, many MB over the life of the transfer that will be stored in memory and not be used 80% of the life of the transfer.
Common file access caches have been good enough for ages for things like fetching specific regions from files, Superfetch by operating at a whole file level is doing you few favors in most cases.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So basically, Vista murders your disks? Steve Ballmer should be worried. Didn't they put Hans Reiser in jail for something like this?
No jail that has chairs will ever be able to hold him!
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
.
Microsoft has two core markets:
The corporate client who moves are glacial because significant changes are expensive and disruptive. It is no coincidence that Linux has had its success in the back office - where transitioning from UNIX is relatively painless.
The home and SOHO user who is not technologically oriented or adept and whose needs and values are not the geek's. MS Vista is close to claiming twenty percent of that market and OSX ten.
Linux has yet to break into the single digit.
The geek talks blithely about market forces - but markets are a study in pragmatism. The solution which is available - today - the solution which gets the job done.
The geek tends to forget how intractable the user can be when it comes to innovation:
The automobile has been around since 1896 and endlessly refined since - but once the tiller is replaced with a wheel and the hand throttle with a foot pedal, the standard UI for the past 100 years is pretty much in place.
See what I mean?
Just mentioning it you get moderated offtopic. This one will probably be moderated as overrated.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
As the owner of a brand spankin' new EEE 901 (that comes OEM with XP on a 4GB SSD and has another 8 GB SSD mounted as D:) I have been driving myself nuts trying to figure out how to avoid running out of space on the too-small C: drive.
In Linux, it's easy - "ln -s" but in XP? Totally non-obvious.
Looks like you've solved my problem for me.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
This is Sandisk trying to cover for their poor performing SSDs. According to the Daily Tech, Sandisk's SSDs have a read/write speed of 67MB/50MB per second. That's slower than many new magnetic drives, and about half what a lot of the competition's SSDs do. So I could certainly see that if you put an SSD in of that speed, that it'd end up feeling slower as it'd be transferring data slower than your magnetic drive.
To me it sounds like a company trying to play off problems with their product on to someone else.
I looked around the internet for a list of operating systems that currently ARE optimized for SSD. Guess how many I found?
old does not mean bad, same as new does not mean good
I completely agree: in the 1980's, C was a bad new language.
Linux has yet to break into the single digit.
Apart from the fact that your figures are wrong, why are you even talking about Linux? I'm making no argument that Linux is more innovative than Windows. Linux is simply what was left after Microsoft effectively killed all its competitors. Linux has a lot of pragmatic advantages over Windows, but in terms of innovation, it is just as outdated as Windows.
but markets are a study in pragmatism
No, they are not. If they were, they'd be adopting Linux. Markets are a study in golf-playing executives being bamboozled and pressured by Microsoft salespeople.
Perhaps SSDs are just disappointing? If you look at the benchmarks for multiple brands of SSDs across multiple OSs, none of them match expectations. They might as well jump on the bandwagon, blame Microsoft, and save some face.
1960's style kernels? The NT kernel is the finest and most advanced one you'll see on a desktop machine
Having a lot of features doesn't make a kernel "fine" or "advanced".
In NT 3.51 it was a true microkernel; things like graphics have since been merged back in for performance, which, while inelegant, is true to the scientific method - if experiment and theory disagree, it is the theory which is wrong.
So, what again do you think is "fine" or "advanced" about it? It's a sluggish kernel with a lot of features, most of which aren't being used.
it was written by, basically, the VMS team
Yes. You say that as if it's a good thing.
hired wholesale after the collapse of DEC.
Actually, they were hired before the collapse of DEC. Hiring away its competitors' brains is one way in which Microsoft killed their competitors.
As for 1970's languages, .net/C# needs to be applauded for finding a way to make a modern language interoperate in both directions with traditional ones
C# isn't a "modern" language and C isn't a "traditional" one. C was a phenomenon that started in the 80's and broke with tradition by throwing out pretty much everything that was known about good language design. UNIX and Windows then perpetuated this bad decision.
It is good that C# interoperates with C. But so did a lot of other languages. Modula-3, for example, did a pretty good job at it.
In fact, Linux has at least one filesystem designed for flash.
So why doesn't Microsoft? Obviously, it was more important for them to meet once a week to debate the structure of "shut down" in the start menu.
I'm not making either of these things up, but I can't verify them right now. No time.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Which in unix is also the same as the VM paging size.
Windows uses these larger allocation blocks also (it goes at least to 16K IIRC), as does Mac OS.
It's the ATA block size that remains at 512B in Vista, so basically every time Windows writes, it writes 8 blocks at a time (or a multiple of that), more if you selected a larger allocation block size when formatting your volume.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Go ahead and make a perfect theoretical product. Now try to sell it.
Reality doesn't always jive with ideas of architecture.
SSDs (and all NAND drivers) actually try to overcome the thrashing problem by leaving "open" pages, where they have some valid data and some non-valid data. Basically, one page has the new data and one has the old data and if you try to read that area, it'll read both and merge them. As the new writes come in, they are put in the new data, until either the new area is all filled and the old one is discarded, or for other reasons the driver decides to put the two pages back into one and thus commit the merge. Sometimes it absorbs inefficient writing methods, and sometimes it fails to.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I was able to get Vista Ultimate down to 10GB, which is still way too much! Running on a VM with a 18GB partition and 512MB memory out of 1GB on a 1.6GHZ Dell Laptop. After initial install and SP1 plus all security updates I was up to 12.7GB, unreal. There is a tool to remove the SP1 which basically makes it permanent but removes the updates from WinSXS, also turned off hibernation as I would not use it in a VM. Other cleaning got it down to the 10.1 GB but I still think that is too much for a new install. WinSXS should be self cleaning, I know it is the intent to keep you out of DLL Hell, but I remember XP only being around 800MB.
VISTA performa aggressive background prefetching of commonly used applications. It also builds a prefetch file in the background. This takes a big chunk of memory and a big of HD space.
OK, for the sake of argument I'll take it as given that it's going to do that. I have some issues with aggressive prefetching, but for a desktop environment it seems to be a win, so I'll set that aside. For a server, where you typically don't launch large applications for short periods of time, that's a different matter.
I use FreeBSD, which has had a unified buffer cache for years. It uses all available memory as buffers, automatically. You can always drop infrequently used *clean* pages because they can get paged back in from the executable (Vista would use the prefetch cache). Dropping stale clean pages is always more efficient than paging out stale dirty pages.
Pages that are involved in your prefetch cache and other background optimizations are not candidates for paging out to the swap file. If they are, then you've got them paged out multiple places, and that's inefficient. The prefatch cache itself is the backing store for them.
So the only pages that are candidates for paging out are stale dirty pages. If I run without a swap file, then my stale dirty pages won't get paged out. That might reduce the efficiency of the background optimization, but that's not grounds for requiring the pagefile to be there at all. AND it doesn't apply to earlier versions of NT, which ALSO had this requirement.
So while that might be a good argument for having a pagefile in Vista, that's not why NT requires a pagefile, period. And that's what I'm asking... why does NT do that? What are the technical reasons that NT is not just "less efficient" but downright unstable when it doesn't have a pagefile?
However, if your disk starts getting over 80% full or you get more than 20% fragmentation on the HD, then your performance begins to suffer due to seeking.
Right, now why is that? UFS only demands 10% overhead, and I've run it with the overhead set as low as 3% for long periods of time, even on partitions that have a super-high rate of creation of small files... like news spools... without fragmentation ever getting over 1%. There are other file system designs where fragmentation is a non-issue. The only major modern operating system where fragmentation is even something you'll EVER think about is NTFS. Why is that?
I'm not asking about why Vista might be better than XP or whatever, Im askin, thechnically, what are the design elements of NTFS that make fragmentation an issue.
Linux will just take advantage of whatever they come up with to speed up Vista.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
This is obviously a copout and they're just making Microsoft the scapegoat because everyone knows Vista is the perfect example of modern software design that boosts performance and requires less demanding hardware than XP ever would have.
I'm sick of these companies trying to make Microsoft look bad, in their vulnerable state at the fringe of bankruptcy, Microsoft truly needs the support of big businesses.
I say we all write an email to these companies calling them monsters for putting the blame on Vista when if they really cared they would have submitted their own code to Vista before it was released.
And if it's such a big deal, they can just fork the project anyways!
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
The unified paging architecture is very elegant (disk cache and swap are just two sides of the same coin); the "kernel personalities" are nice and useful (see SFU), it has an asynchronous API which actually works, even if underused, its priority scheduling handles I/O properly so you can actually use it (on windows, you can play a video smoothly in a player set to high priority while hashing files in the background; try the same on linux and it'll stutter like anything, because the video player's getting more than enough CPUtime but not getting priority in its hard disk accesses).
C# isn't a "modern" language
It was created pretty damn recently, which is pretty much the definition. But the great thing about .net is that lots of languages are supported.
It is good that C# interoperates with C. But so did a lot of other languages. Modula-3, for example, did a pretty good job at it.
Almost all languages interoperate with C in one direction - they can call C code. But few allow interoperation in the other direction, calling them from C. Those languages which do generally do so by restricting themselves to the C ABI and hence the C types; the great advancement in .net is to allow bidirectional interoperation between all supported languages, with a rich type system that can support classes, first-class functions, etc. (And all without many time-consuming type conversions)
I am trolling
So, without some sort of magic bean, how do you propose that Vista accomplishes the below without using the CPU?
Please refer to the links below for even more ways that Vista uses your CPU against you.
n order to prevent users from copying DRM content, Windows Vista provides process isolation and continually monitors what kernel-mode software is loaded. If an unverified component is detected, then Vista will stop playing DRM content, rather than risk having the content copied. The Protected Environment is implemented completely in software, so software-based attacks such as patching the Windows kernel are possible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_and_safety_features_new_to_Windows_Vista#Digital_Rights_Management
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PVP-OPM
Good thing I use Linux.
Oh wait...
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Hello. My name is Ingo Molnar. You killed my flash drive. Prepare to be reformatted.
The unified paging architecture is very elegant [...] its priority scheduling handles I/O properly
In different words, you're handwaving.
its priority scheduling handles I/O properly so you can actually use it (on windows, you can play a video smoothly in a player set to high priority while hashing files in the background; try the same on linux and it'll stutter like anything, because the video player's getting more than enough CPUtime but not getting priority in its hard disk accesses).
I'm sorry, but you don't understand scheduling if you think that such a factoid (even if true) would prove that one system is better designed than another.
C# was created pretty damn recently, which is pretty much the definition.
A reproduction of a baroque chair is not a "modern" chair, and an imperative, single inheritance, statically typed object oriented language is not "modern".
the great advancement in .net is to allow bidirectional interoperation between all supported languages, with a rich type system that can support classes, first-class functions, etc. (And all without many time-consuming type conversions)
That's not a "great advancement". The Symbolics Lisp machine supported that in the 1980's, and there were dozens of interoperable languages on the JVM before .NET even existed.
Wow, you're so hardcore and edgy. I'm sure James Dean would be proud.
Vista is now the scapegoa(s)t.
Easy way out if you ask me.
Uh, yeah, that's actually a perfect example. Not quite sure why you phrased it in such a fashion to make it seam as though this is evidence against my post. Consider the alternative: It's closed source. Even if you know there is a problem you can not do much about it until the company with access to the source code fixes it, if the company is even around twenty five years later. If you're running twenty five year old cold source software the odds of it getting patched ever again are pretty much nil, but if it's open source even such an obscure twenty five year old problem can be fixed by anyone who cares too.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
My impression from Microsoft presentations on it was that it was XML based, and patent encumbered. Using their proprietary Microsoft's proprietary and ill-documented SQL would be no better.
An 'advanced data storage' system sounds like a filesystem to me. The Wikipedia write-up is not bad, but makes more sense if you've heard a few schemes of encumbering filesystems with additional layers of data in the past. Unfortunately, it's usually been done quite badly and unstably.
Ever since Bill Gates found that his BASIC was getting pirated, newer and weirder stuff has been going on from Microsoft to prevent piracy of their operating systems.
Now we see the logical conclusion of such efforts:
Make an operating system no one wants in the first place, and no one will want to pirate it!
(And how many people REALLY pirated "Snakes On A Plane", anyway?!@?)
DuRMly yours,
Dave
But that's what you get for putting your eggs in the Microsoft basket. Microsoft has held back the development of the PC by at least ten years. If PS2 ports and printers you have to load fonts to wasn't evidence enough, now we have manufacturers just flat out admitting Microsoft is in no position to implement new tech. Pathetic.
Fiat Homos et Pereat Theos
So you would downgrade the hardware in order to keep up with the software ??? interesting ....
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
So, why do you flame GNU/Linux advocates when there is nothing useful to say?
I don't know - why do you flame Microsoft when you don't have anything useful to say?
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
May I suggest that a group of businesses and private citizens start a class action lawsuit to force MicroSoft to continue to support XP/XP Pro until the market place itself shows such support to be unwarranted. ("Would like like XP or Vista with that computer?", says the salesdroid.) There is a well known (to contractor programmers) rule that says that even if you develop software on your own time to make your work at a company easier, if others at the company adopt your tools and the company becomes dependent on those tools, then you cannot claim ownership and take them with you when you are let go (learning this cost me about $800K, the company gibbeted another contract programmer so I'd get the message). Sort of an anti-addiction component, you can't hook 'em then run with the goods.
By definition, the best design is that which works best.
A reproduction of a baroque chair is not a "modern" chair, and an imperative, single inheritance, statically typed object oriented language is not "modern".
Accepting that for the sake of argument, you can use languages which are none of those in .net, should you so wish.That's not a "great advancement". The Symbolics Lisp machine supported that in the 1980's, and there were dozens of interoperable languages on the JVM before .NET even existed.
I can't talk about the lism machine, but it occurred on the JVM more or less by accident, with no real promotion from Sun, wheras MS is actively pushing it.
I am trolling
Nobody seems to be blaming Microsoft..they seem to be blaming Vista specifically. Let's face it. Vista is a less than stellar OS, it does crazy things that people don't like..heck DOWNGRADING from it is a FEATURE. I take that Sandisk also tried their SSDs on XP,OSX and various Linuxes as well and can conclude that they performed to spec. So if I was Sandisk I'd just release the product with a BIG disclaimer "WILL NOT WORK WITH VISTA" and go with it like that.