Solid State Disk manufacturers love to talk about how robust, energy efficient and fast their drives are when compared with traditional magnetic storage based hard disks. However, while SSDs typically have very low access times and fast read transfers, most SSDs suffer from sluggish write performance. To make matters worse, SanDisk has announced that it has delayed the launch of optimised drives until next year to overcome serious performance issues with Windows Vista, according to this c|net report. SanDisk claims that while its current controller technology is very good, the company did not fully understand Vista's limitations when developing its controller and thus will be short of what the market really needs.
According to SanDisk's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Eli Harari, SSD markers will find Windows Vista a special challenge to deal with, as Windows Vista is not optimised for flash memory based solid state disks, particularly once the user runs Vista applications on their SSD based computer. As a result of Vista's design, the next generation of SSD controllers will need to compensate for Vista's shortfalls. However, when it comes to the low end market PCs which contain small SSDs of under 32GB, the existing controllers easily handle the unsophisticated and less demanding requirements. This is not really surprising since these budget ultra-compacts typically run Linux or Windows XP.
One thing interesting here is that while Windows Vista is designed to take advantage of flash memory for its ReadyBoost feature, a feature that received a lot of publicity after Vista’s launch, it seems like Microsoft has forgot all about tweaking Vista for use flash based SSDs. This may explain the disappointing experience users got with the first laptops that feature SSDs.
