Next Generation SSDs Delayed Due To Vista 600
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Pointing fingers (Score:3, Insightful)
It's more like Vista's disk scheduler and disk usage patterns are complete incompetent on modern hardware.
While Linux has modern filesystems and gets optimized and fixed almost constantly, Windows Vista still uses the same basic NTFS layout and associated algorithms that were finalised around 10 years ago, and weren't even very good back then. There have been only very minor revisions to NTFS and virtually none of them have improved its performance or reduced its fragmentation.
MS marketing doesnt consider it a problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Based on the statement, it earns the Vista Capable sticker...
On a serious note, I would try not to think that this is a case of -insert company- blaming MS for their own shortfall. Although I am more likely to believe that this is Vista's fault and in this case MS should be the one issuing some patches...
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Pointing fingers (Score:2, Insightful)
Driver is for supporting device abstraction layer in an OS.
If the fault is within the file system not optimizing for flash wear leveling or have frequent unnecessary writes to a device, would you suggest a hardware device vendor to make the file system too? How far in the OS do you want a 3rd party hardware vendor to work on?
File swapping destroys SSDs (Score:3, Insightful)
Thus, lots of reads/writes via the swap file or web browser caches accelerate the death of Flash SSDs.
I wish newer OSes made tinier footprints and would use RAMDrives more like Damn Small Linux, thus prolonging the life of the "hard drives" of machines like the Asus EEE.
Indeed indeed! Vista would ruin an SSD fast. (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Unbelievable (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:MS marketing doesnt consider it a problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Vista works fine on current hard drives, and flash based memory is historically slower than HDDs, so blaming MS for it is absurd. If they cannot develop fast enough SSDs, its their bloody fault. What you are saying is that MS should patch their software so it works with the brand new state of art SLOW hardware.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Unbelievable (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Unbelievable (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh, by requiring more computing power it is indeed responsible for a bit of global warming...
Re:Unbelievable (Score:1, Insightful)
Well, OS X does that quite a bit. Maybe not thrash, but my machine has a continually on-going relationship with the hard drive despite 4 GB of RAM it could talk with instead. I don't understand why a machine whose diagnostic app from the OS vendor lists 2.3 GB of free (available) RAM is relying on hard disk-based virtual memory for basic tasks. Then there's the lack of control for real-time systems, but that's for another discussion....
Re:Unbelievable (Score:2, Insightful)
You make it sound like that's all they're sitting around doing, is casting blame. I never understood that logic.
Don't you think they have a R&D department working hard to make this next generation happen? Why does this announcement and working on their products have to be exclusive from one another? Lets be a bit more sensible in the course of discussion. Vista is shit, that was their point.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Insightful)
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!"
Ya, it is Vista's fault... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.)
Newsflash (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Insightful)
And guess what, the article is crap. No details.
Of course Vista isn't optimized for SSDs, why should it have been? Is Windows XP optimized for SSDs? The only thing related difference I can see is Vista has a larger footprint.
To me it looks like they're casting blame (while trying to get their tech up to speed).
Vista is crap. But "Next Gen SSDs Delayed Due To Vista" sounds like bullshit to me.
Anti-Vista FUD (Score:3, Insightful)
If Vista's not optimized for these SSDs, are you going to now tell me that an earlier version of Windows IS?
No? Right.
Vista's just fine. It's everyone's favorite punching bag, but much of the bad rap is undeserved and reactive bandwagoning.
Hardware might be further behind. Gone are the days of the heady acceleration in hardware performance found during the 98->2K and 2K->XP transitions.
I've a beefy four year-old desktop which started life in XP and now runs Vista with an experience index of 4.8. That's better than almost all the PCs offered for sale right now! That's the sad bit. The hardware isn't as stupefyingly better in so short a time now, like it was in the past.
Re:minor compared to all the other things (Score:2, Insightful)
Old does indeed not mean bad. But there are some issues that seem to be impossible to address without a major change in how OS works. Security, stability, predictability and resource use are nowhere to be seen in the bigger OS implementations today.
Security is an afterthought thats solved by endlessly patch defects in applications. This is something that can be solved in the OS and compiler level to a very high degree, just not with todays methods and tools.
Stability is at pretty flaky and fault tolerance at a bare minimum (i don't count bad hardware into this). One would expect a modern computer to be more stable than a Dos, CP/M or MacOS machine that has 20 years of age.
Predictability is much better in Linux than in Windows. In Linux things mostly work if done right and don't work at all if done wrong and theres rarely a gray area there. Applications is another matter where much work is needed in both the Linux and the Windows world. I should be able to do something and know it will be the same no matter how many times i do it. That means stable API's, stable input/outputs, punishing bad behavior and good fault tolerance.
Resource use is the biggest problem and probably something that affects all of the above. When doing stuff in high level languages we sacrifice control and deep knowledge for faster development. The time saved is then spent tenfold throughout the applications entire life in fixing all the little errors that went into it because of lack of both knowledge and planning.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Insightful)
Not once you get Vista running on it.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:2, Insightful)
"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."
Did it occur to you then that people were right in both cases? That XP sucked when it was released and gradually improved into something useable?
That maybe the problem is with Microsofts release strategy?
Re:Unbelievable (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Unbelievable (Score:4, Insightful)
Why? It's true!
Re:Unbelievable (Score:3, Insightful)
I swear at Tourette's patients.
(And if any post cried out to be modded Redundant, this would be the one).
Re:Unbelievable (Score:3, Insightful)
Hardly a day seems to go by without some unfounded Vista bashing going on somewhere on the planet.
Where are the numbers to back up the claims?? Would it really be so hard to more precisely describe said "highly demanding applications"???
I could go on all day.
My Copy of Vista 64 has a stability index of 10 on my simple XPS1330 notebook and it's powered up 18 hours a day. The only thing that ever brought it down were Acrobat.exe and mfetdik.sys after a resume from hibernate. Go figure...
Come up with cold hard facts of shut up, that's what I say.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't buy it. There is no noticeable objection to Vista with the average consumer. I'm not talking about "knowledgeable" geeks, I'm talking about the other 95% of consumers, the ones who if they even know what Linux is, don't know that it has a desktop or email or "the Interweb".
Improvement as a value (Score:3, Insightful)
Working on improvements "just" to see one's program run better seems to be typical for Open Source projects, while the commercial competition tends to invest the man-hours only when there is an immediate need. Mostly for new features, sometimes for performance (but the latter only if customers are complaining).
I've had it made clear by my boss at work that we don't rework our programs unless there is a project for it. Which happens only when our customer are complaining, see above. Something like the repeated rewrite of the Linux scheduler, while the previous version already yields reasonable performance, would be unthinkable in this environment.
Re:Optimized? (Score:3, Insightful)
Huh? System cooling makes far more noise than the disk drive in just about every system I've been near.
Re:File swapping destroys SSDs (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
I't not like Vista is a big surprise.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Vista (and NTFS) were around long before this generation of SSDs were designed.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not so sure this isn't more of an issue of their incompetence: they aren't good enough to intentionally be this bad solely on the merit of disregard. It's because they are bad at design that their product is bad and, because of their monopoly, they can continue to be this bad.
SanDisk, too, is coming off as incompetent: here they have a chance to drive Microsoft by offering a better product that, it seems, only Microsoft cannot take a advantage of. Instead of shaming Microsoft to fix what's broken, whether with Vista or with whatever is next, they instead dumb down their product for Vista and thus submit themselves to Microsoft's hegemony.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Insightful)
I decided to start disabling that system service after I had noticed it was trying to cache an incomplete ~100 MB file that was being downloaded by a P2P application to RAM. WTF, I was never going to open that file until it was done!
I would have to disagree. Unless you are leaching 100% the P2P program would need to access the entire file.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Insightful)
You seem to have missed something: "These days" implies that the poster was referring to reasonably modern hardware. Trotting out a machine that is litteraly obsolete* as a case study proves nothing other than that Vista doesn't play nice on old hardware. Granted, it probably doesn't play all that nice at the lower end of modern hardware either.
*obsolete in the sense that none of the parts you mention are still being sold. You simply cannot buy a new machine with those specifications any more. Hell, the GFX card alone has been off the market for at least 4 years, and is barely comparable to even integrated GFX, never mind a cheap $50 low end card.
If you want to prove that Vista runs like a dog on reasonably modern hardware, at least use reasonably modern hardware as a reference.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Insightful)
As much as I dislike Vista, I've 'downgraded' my laptop which came with Vista to XP, I can't see how this is entirely Microsoft's fault.
SSDs are new to the scene and still today are not anywhere near the commonplace. Vista has been out for a while now, how could they have optimized for SSDs and why would you spend the resources, perhaps delaying the already massively delayed OS for a niche market.
It sounds to me that SanDisk is trying to divert the blame a little. I would want my SSD to outperform a HDD under any workload no matter what OS it is running under.
SanDisk QQ and fix your product then take these dinosaur spinning disk manufacturers down.:)
Re:Unbelievable (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Go play with XP before service pack 1, before service pack 2. You'll end up swearing and cussing at it a lot I bet. People love XP now because they are used to it, it now considered to be rather stable, and the performance of computers has outpaced the OS by so much that the OS is neither seen as a hog on HD or processor capabilities.
The reason why I hate vista and the people I know that hate it hate it... because it takes up more resources without giving my any significant bonuses back. I mean look at the comparisons between Vista and XP [microsoft.com]. Most of it is marketing bull by saying that you can do this in Vista and you can't in XP. The bottom line is that Vista comes with things I don't want or don't need, but am basically forced to use because you can't turn it off.
Re:OMG!! (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you overestimate Vista market penetration
This is true - I feel penetrated every time I'm even NEAR a computer running Vista. Lucky it's not often...
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Insightful)
Trotting out a machine that is litteraly obsolete* as a case study proves nothing other than that Vista doesn't play nice on old hardware.
If you have to specify the definition of "obsolete" that you're using, perhaps it's not the most cromulent term to use.
Yes, up until very recently a 5-year-old piece of desktop kit would have been considered obsolete, in every sense. But today, we're at a point where that "ancient" Pentium IV with 512MB of RAM is (or should be) all the processing power the typical web surfer or spreadsheet jockey normally needs.
Hardware manufacturers' desire to keep selling more new products doesn't mean that all prior products have become functionally obsolete.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you think XP, OSX, and for that matter, Linux, are generally "optimized for SSDs"?
No, but I don't think they're as openly hostile to permanent storage not based on Winchester drive technology, either.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm going to keep it simple and just tell you to refresh this slashdot article, read at level 1 and start counting anti-MS posts and pro-MS posts.
At 10:10am EST I see
16 anti-MS
2 neutral: 1 post that just says "42" and this one.
0 pro-MS
Even the post you're referring to is not visible to me as it was either posted as anonymous or modded below 1.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:3, Insightful)
If it has some kind of needless services and huge idle overhead like XP does, it does indeed have some responsibility for global warming.
The size of Windows installed PCs are huge... Really huge... A 10-20% overhead on a modern CPU is way more different than 1% in terms of energy usage.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:2, Insightful)
Yet another example showing vista to contribute to global warming: WASTE! A machine like the parent mentioned is perfectly fine to run most applications (as shown by the parent: he's running quite a few useful things there). Merely loading vista requires dumping the machine and buying a new one. Guess what: it costs A LOT OF ENERGY to produce a computer (or any other thing, pretty much). Vista is the pits.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:3, Insightful)
My problem is that Windows tends to feel slow when I don't expect it to so that it may feel quicker later when I expect it to feel slow.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:3, Insightful)
Trotting out a machine that is litteraly obsolete* as a case study
While technically true, this is also about right for low-end machines these days.
512 megs of RAM is most likely the biggest bottleneck for Vista. Machines are still sold with 512 megs of RAM.
And it is possible to get underpowered, integrated Intel cards. While not as slow as a GeForce2, the same thing applies -- Vista would struggle, but Ubuntu will show you far more eye candy and actually seem happy.
And while it might not be a Pentium4, you can almost certainly get a single-core Celeron at about that speed.
All of these will be sold to you as a "Vista Capable" machine -- or maybe it's "Vista Ready" -- whichever means "It's possible to boot the OS, but not do anything else." (What kind of sick fucking joke is that? Yes, they're literally selling computers which are not designed to be useful for anything other than booting an OS -- and no one uses a computer just to boot an OS, except perhaps Vista engineers.)
Yet these are probably better than the specs on, say, an EEE PC. There are new markets opening up for less powerful computers, and Vista won't be in any of them.
It proves something else, too -- you're basically admitting that Vista requires much more hardware than any OS has a right to, while providing no additional value. That is, it will require a much better video card, to show you much worse eye candy than Ubuntu. OEMs like that in the short term, for forcing everyone to buy insanely more hardware than they need, but the more innovative ones won't let that stand.
Why wait to fix Vista for your flash drive, when you could just target Linux, which actually has at least one filesystem designed and optimized exclusively for flash?
Re:Unbelievable (Score:3, Insightful)
On Linux, stuff which has just been loaded from disk by programs actually needing it right now is left around in RAM, until that RAM is needed for something else.
On Vista, if I am reading right, stuff which Vista thinks might be used someday is actually fetched into RAM, thus wearing out your disk and slowing down your computer while it does this, when most of the time, it's going to be wrong.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, I haven't, having been subjected to multiple downward moderations for making pro-Microsoft comments. It's a universal phenomenon which I suspect is down to people thinking that saying something they don't agree with is trolling.
Anyway, as stated by another poster, if you browse at 1 you can't see a single pro-MS comment on the first page...
Actually, thinking about it, I remember you now - you foed me because I explained this to you before and you must have decided I'm a shill... because I don't agree with you. Gotta love how these things come back around.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:3, Insightful)
I was going to mock Windows for not being able to run on Cell based machines like the PS3, but it looks like somebody has managed it
Actually, it runs inside QEMU on Fedora... So technically speaking it doesn't run on the PS3. It's like saying that GameBoy Color games can run on x86 processors because there are GBC emulators.
Re:Optimized? (Score:3, Insightful)
Then you need better fans. My main box has fans on the CPU, GPU and case, but the only things I can actually hear are the drives (and even then only on seek). It's in an office so I don't really care, but getting my Tivo onto SSD one day would be nice, I don't like the HDD chatter in the living room.
Re:OMG!! (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you overestimate Vista market penetration,
No, as with most Microsoft products, Vista penetrates the market quite thoroughly, violently, and in every possible orifice.
Re:Newsflash (Score:5, Insightful)
Well then, please explain how Vista decides not to apply restriction to non-DRM'ed content. Be especially precise to explain how Vista does that without using magic.
Mart