SSDs and Vista don’t play nice together
Solid State Disks (SSDs) have been thought to be the cat’s meow. Replacing slow, power-hungry spinning hard drives with these SSDs was heralded to be the performance boost that mobile computers need to hit the road with style. The lack of spinning parts was also thought to be a big boon for obtaining better battery life to stretch the minutes the road warrior could be working away from a power outlet.
Alas, recent benchmarks have dashed those expectations, first showing that SSDs don’t necessarily provide better performance than the old-school spinning disks and more recently that battery savings are not what they should be. While many of us were surprised by these revelations the CEO of Sandisk Eli Harari, maker of SSDs, is not surprised.
His take on the situation puts the blame squarely on the fact that Vista is not optimized to take advantage of the memory-based disks.
SSD "performance in the Vista environment falls short of what themarket really needs", admitted Harari at the company’s earningsconference this week.
Why not? According to Harari, it’s because "Vista is not optimised for Flash memory solid-state disks".
It sounds like the SSD makers better get on the ball and make some SSD-specific controllers which is probably where the lack of optimization comes into play. Currently SSDs are treated by the systems as traditional hard disks and that can’t be the best way to go with memory-based drives. Let’s hope someone gets this figured out pretty soon as I do believe that SSDs could play a major role in improving performance and battery life for mobile PCs.
(via the Register)
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Vista seems to work well on the SSD in my laptop. When I got the machine I disabled auto defrag, indexing, and the HDD shock sensor utility.
Is this is actually a Vista problem, or just a general operating system issue?
Vista problem.
The EEEPC works much better with linux in the long run. Afer several weeks of use linux still seems fresh while XP gets bogged down.
XP can be modified using registry hacks to keep the writing operations to a minimum but those instructions are not that easy to find or do.
I’m kinda disapointed at the SSD makers too because they were supposed to release hybrid HDDs as well as pure SSDs. I’ve seen nothing on any release and the only thing similar to that is Readyboost.
Hybrid hard drives seem like a better fit for Vista but it seems like they won’t be coming out after all.
In my opinion SSD’s are downright terrible anyway. I was so excited when i first read about them but once i read about the fact that flash memory degrades quickly due to huge voltage needed to clear a segment of memory i instantly decided against purchasing one. I believe that they will eventually become less power hungry and quicker but due to the nature of the technology they will always be less reliable than a HDD.
@vm-01:
In how far is the fact that XP requires modifications to the registry profing that this is a Vista problem?
And as far as XP goes: What writing operations need to be kept to a minimum – and why are they requireing registry hacks?
Obviously a defrag does not make much sense on an SSD, so disabling Auto-defrag and potentially similar services that cause unnecessary writing operations can be disabled, but as far as I know this can be done in the control panel and does not need “open heart surgery” in the registry.