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.'"

Unbelievable

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.

Re:Unbelievable

Impressive; Vista can slow down a company's product development, not just the computers it's running on!

Re:Unbelievable

I heard that Vista causes cancer, kicks puppies, and is responsible for global warming.

Re:Unbelievable

Vista killed my father, and raped my mother!

Re:Unbelievable

Every time you boot into Vista, god kills a little kitten!

Re:Unbelievable

They really need to [...] use a good, transparent virtualization scheme for backwards compatability.

Yes, THIS. Running legacy apps in a virtualized 2k/xp environment so they can get a clean start without worrying about backwards compatibility and all the bullshit that comes with it. Hardware is plenty powerful enough to do it, these days.

Re:Unbelievable

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

Much as I love Microsoft bashing, this is bull. The SSD manufacturers are moving their products into a market dominated by an established technology, namely hard disks, and it's up to them to make their products perform well enough to displace that established technology. Running well on SSDs wasn't a design goal of Vista, and AFAICS there is a limit to what Microsoft can do about this in the short term. I'm sure this will be on the radar for the next version of Windows, but at the moment I would say the SSD manufacturers need to work on their products rather than casting blame.

Re:Unbelievable

Seriously, how could the SSD manufacturers not know that one of Vista requirements were: Thrash the hard disk for no reason at some random point in time yielding no apparent benefits.

Re:Unbelievable

Your first line is pretty trollish, but I agree with some of the points you make later. But first... Are you actually naive enough to buy this "our sales and performance are bad because Vista isn't optimized, omg!" bullshit? Do you think XP, OSX, and for that matter, Linux, are generally "optimized for SSDs"? This is a plea to investors and market analysts, saying "look, it's not our fault our numbers suck...it's Vista! Blame them!" It's a little after the fact to be blaming Vista on your shitty performance - Vista has been around long enough for them to get their act together. I remember the backlash when XP became mainstream and MSFT was everyone's favorite whipping boy because "Windows 98SE had better performance" and "Windows 2000 doesn't have a playskool theme." Now everyone swears by XP. Not that Vista is a fantastic or even decent OS - but it's become everyone's favorite whipping boy, the George Bush of the technology industry, and it's more than a little retarded. I'd like to see MSFT bring modularity and optionality to more of it's core components (read: remove IE and WMP). And they absolutely should leverage their Hypervisor tech, using it as a foundation for backwards compatibility - how great would it be to be able to run your legacy apps in a well-hidden (previous) Windows virtual machine? But the fact of the matter is, MSFT has the tech world by the balls, and the day when "openoffice experience" and "Microsoft Office experience" are equivalent on a secretaries resume are a long, long way off.

Re:Unbelievable

linux has different scheduling algorithms, usually anticipatory and cfq are used for disks, and those schedulers tries to pack reads of adiacent sectors (reading also unneeded data to keep the sustained speed) - but linux also have a do nothing schedule to be used with disks with low random acces time and low bandwidth (as the SSDs)

if vista has the same sort of disk optimization, without the ability to manually chose the disk scheduling, then the os is wasting the scarce bandwidth on a medium which is the exact opposite of a disk in term of performance. not that the optimization is bad per se, and it is very common to find prefetching on hd (even done by the controller).

Re:Unbelievable

Yeah, I had to laugh at this, what a fucking joke. "We are moving from building SSDs for primarily digital cameras which, less face it, have pretty low IO requirements, other than burst write rates on higher megapixel models, to computers using them as their primary drives with heavy read-write IO. Accordingly, we're going to blame the fact that our hardware wasn't designed for such a thing on the fact that OSes may perform heavy read/write".

What a travesty.

"We didn't make as much profit because SSDs are with every passing day becoming more and more of a commodity, and due to the fact that we make products on the higher end of the market than the $10/gb K-mart crap (i.e. Ultra and Extreme product lines)". Far more accurate.

Slashdot isn't much better, "Ooh, look, `nother chance to slap Vista for max page views and ad revenue, jump on it!"

What sort of optimization?

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?

Optimized?

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.

It is not just vista...

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++

Obligatory matrix misquote

"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.

Indeed indeed! Vista would ruin an SSD fast.

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.

Re:Indeed indeed! Vista would ruin an SSD fast.

I'd love to see a laptop power consumption test of XP vs Vista on an identically spec'd machine. (tickety tick, thrashity thrash)

On my Thinkpad X60, Vista reduced the run time by at least an hour, until I disabled the damn disk indexing crap (and it's still shorter -- I'll move back to XP when I decide to quit being lazy).

that's one way to look at it

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).

Famous quote

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?

Ya, it is Vista's fault...

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.)

Re:Pointing fingers

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.

Re:Funny how Sandisk is the only one with this pro

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 [dailytech.com] (and others [techspot.com]) have also added opinions similar to yours. From the DT article:

• "It is quite true that SanDisk's SSD are woefully subpar in performance when running Windows Vista. Numerous benchmarks from around the web have shown SanDisk SSDs getting outpaced by the competition.

  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 [laptopmag.com] than with the standard 80GB HDD -- an Eee PC 1000h featuring similar specifications was significantly faster with a competing SSD from Samsung [laptopmag.com].

  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 [dailytech.com] which clock in at 120 to 143 MB/sec for reads and 80 to 93 MB/sec for writes)."

Re:what about linux?

Not exactly what you were looking for, but at least on the macbook air the SSD doesnt seem to improve performance [gizmodo.com], but there are other reasons to get SSDs besides peformance. For starters, you can create a laptop with almost no moving parts, which can be very nice for certain environments. Plus, the SSD is less likely to have a catastrophic crash than traditional hds(provided you aren't doing an inordinate amount of writes, all the more reason to have as much ram as possible!)

Re:I wonder what he means

Oh, also. Vista has a great tool for seeing how much disk activity is going on. Hit CTRL-ALT-DEL then click on "Start Task Manager". On the "Performance" tab, click "Resource Manager". UAC will prompt you to continue. Then click to expand the "Disk" section.

You can see even when you think your computer should be idle that Vista has anywhere from several dozen to over a hundred outstanding writes queued up to the hard drive at just about any time.

Re:File swapping destroys SSDs

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.