Sandisk CEO: ''Windows Vista not Optimized for SSDs''

[btarunr]

During a conference of the company's second quarter earnings, the CEO Eli Harari of Sandisk, a significant player in the solid state drive (SSD) industry said that Windows Vista would present a special challenge for solid state drive (SSD) makers. Says Harari: "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 hints at the design of Vista as a cause for performance not being upto the mark, adding that Sandisk's next generation drive controllers should aim to "basically compensate for Vista shortfalls".

"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," said Harari. Ironically, he has also been quoted saying that such issues didn't affect the "very low-end, ultra low-cost PCs" (read ULPCs), where existing controller technologies could handle 8 ~ 32 GB drive capacities. Clever choice of words since that's the segment that has drive manufacturers, both SSD and HDD, eying at since it's an emerging segment.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[cdawall]

so basically we get to see that M$ pushed out an unfinished product that wasn't up to par?

 

[newconroer]

Sandisk is a laugh.

MS could easily turn the table and say that SD's products are not flexible enough.

 

[[I.R.A]_FBi]

pointing fingers generally gets you nowhere

 

[Kreij]

It would help his cause a little if he shed some light on why Vista was not optimized for SSD.

 

[[I.R.A]_FBi]

Im betting he's reffering to the hundreds of reads and writes going on in the background by default

 

[mlupple]

It's the other way around. Sandisk's SSDs are not optimized for Windows Vista. How about releasing drivers like everyone else?

 

[hat]

It's the other way around. Sandisk's SSDs are not optimized for Windows Vista. How about releasing drivers like everyone else?

Drivers? For a hard drive? I've never heard about hard disk drivers, aside from RAID. :shadedshu

 

[mlupple]

Drivers? For a hard drive? I've never heard about hard disk drivers, aside from RAID. :shadedshu

Then make them. AMD's not gonna bitch because their video card doesn't work the way they want it to natively in windows so they're going to make drivers for it.

 

[Kreij]

Drivers? For a hard drive? I've never heard about hard disk drivers, aside from RAID. :shadedshu

The controller (driver) is for the bus. Each bus on the motherboard uses a driver (IDE, SATA, PCIe, etc.)

Sandisk SSD's use the SATA bus.
Sandisk claims their SSD's can maintain a sustained read rate of 67MB/s.

The Theortical limit on SATA 2 (3Gb/s) is 376MB/s
On SATA 1 (1.5Gb/s) its 187.5 MB/s

Both bus speeds are considerably higher than the sustained rate of the SSDs.

That is why it would have been nice for him to drop a little technical info on his "Vista not optimized" statement. Where, exactly, is the problem occurring?


Whoops ... found this. Vista's the problem ? Doesn't appear that way.

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).

 

[Dia01]

What's he mean "Vista is not optimized for flash memory solid state disk,". Vista recommends using a flash drive for ready boost. Scare mongering tactics, especially when the OCZ Core Series are offering reasonable priced SSD's at the moment, and that's in Australia!

 

[Easy Rhino]

wake me up when SSDs are priced for the average consumer. then i will care.

 

[WhiteLotus]

wake me up when SSDs are priced for the average consumer. then i will care.

i have to agree with this.


and yea why chuck that statement out with no evidence.

 

[hat]

I agree with Easy Rhino as well.
Oh look, a 128gb SSD. Looks like they're finally getting to sub-par storage levels. But wait! It only comes at the low-low price of over $500!
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227345

I'd rather take this cool Western Digital Caviar 1TB drive forr $240
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136206

 

[[I.R.A]_FBi]

when i can get 2 120 gb ssd's for 100 dollars ill be interested

 

[Megasty]

Hardly worth a yawn. These giant flash drives have to come down to earth b4 normal computer shoppers like me will even turn an eye to this kind of news.

The only funny part of it is how Harari is complaining about vista when its basically his drives which are too slow.

 

[TheGuruStud]

I bet vista fails at SSD b/c it read/writes to it like a flash drive. Have you ever used a flash drive on vista? It's like using a 3.5 floppy. Actually, a 3.5 floppy is faster. But the interesting thing is that the perf. isn't completely abysmal using FAT, but using NTFS makes it so slow, it's literally useless. It would take an hour to load a multi-GB drive. I even remember trying to load just a few MBs of small files and it took 15 mins. Pathetic.

 

[newtekie1]

This is exactly how it should be. It is either you optimize it for a regular HDD or a SSD. Microsoft optimized it for HDD's since that is what the large majority of users will have, and that will continue to be the case for long after Vista is EOL'd.

so basically we get to see that M$ pushed out an unfinished product that wasn't up to par?

Isn't up to par? I don't think "up to par" means what you think it means. Up to par means that it is at the expected standard. SSD's aren't anywhere near the standard. Why should Microsoft waste time optimizing their OS for less than 1% of their users. I think there are much bigger problems with Vista than SSD optimizations.

 

[FatForester]

so basically we get to see that M$ pushed out an unfinished product that wasn't up to par?

What a useful post, enlighten me more!

They're just trying to get people to buy their SSD's under the illusion that if Microsoft fixes their "problems" it will perform better. Yawn.

 

[Mussels]

I bet vista fails at SSD b/c it read/writes to it like a flash drive. Have you ever used a flash drive on vista? It's like using a 3.5 floppy. Actually, a 3.5 floppy is faster. But the interesting thing is that the perf. isn't completely abysmal using FAT, but using NTFS makes it so slow, it's literally useless. It would take an hour to load a multi-GB drive. I even remember trying to load just a few MBs of small files and it took 15 mins. Pathetic.

my 2GB rally does 25MB/s, my 4GB imation nano does 12MB/s no matter how full it is, and my brothers 8GB manages around the 15MB/s mark (its on NTFS)

i've never seen this USB problem you speak of in vista.

 

[TheGuruStud]

my 2GB rally does 25MB/s, my 4GB imation nano does 12MB/s no matter how full it is, and my brothers 8GB manages around the 15MB/s mark (its on NTFS)

i've never seen this USB problem you speak of in vista.

consider yourself lucky

 

[Mussels]

consider yourself lucky

give some details on the problem if you can, i'll try and reproduce it.

I'm yet to see slow USB on vista, most lanners use vista x64 now around here and flash drives are the most common way of transferring files between us.

 

[newtekie1]

give some details on the problem if you can, i'll try and reproduce it.

I'm yet to see slow USB on vista, most lanners use vista x64 now around here and flash drives are the most common way of transferring files between us.

Agreed, I've never seen this USB Flash Drive issue either.

Besides that, Vista doesn't see SSD drive like Flash Drive, it sees them as a standard SATA drive.

 

[TheGuruStud]

give some details on the problem if you can, i'll try and reproduce it.

I'm yet to see slow USB on vista, most lanners use vista x64 now around here and flash drives are the most common way of transferring files between us.

Maybe it's been fixed. I avoid vista like the plague .
I just know that any ntfs flash volume took forever to write to.

And don't get me started on file copy/delete lol. I've never waited 7 seconds to delete files that are tiny.

 

[Mussels]

Maybe it's been fixed. I avoid vista like the plague .
I just know that any ntfs flash volume took forever to write to.

And don't get me started on file copy/delete lol. I've never waited 7 seconds to delete files that are tiny.

the delete bug has been gone for a long time, it was in a hotfix, and permanently nuked in SP1.