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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
"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 *
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..
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...
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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.)
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.
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.
$
http://www.sandisk.com/Corporate/PressRoom/PressReleases/PressRelease.aspx?ID=3785
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.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
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