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.'"
What sort of optimization? (Score:5, Interesting)
Optimized? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Pointing fingers (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Funny how Sandisk is the only one with this proble (Score:4, Interesting)
Sandisk SSD drives are poorly made and perform poorly (much worse than others..). This is just Sandisk trying to shift the blame elsewhere..
Re:Indeed indeed! Vista would ruin an SSD fast. (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
Re:Indeed indeed! Vista would ruin an SSD fast. (Score:2, Interesting)
I upgraded my computer at the time from XP to Vista, and once Superfetch learned what programs I used a lot, I noticed programs like Firefox and Visual Studio loaded significantly faster than under XP.
Also, by default Vista doesn't index files as fast/at all when a laptop is on battery, so this affect the battery life of a laptop. I don't know how XP and Vista actually compare on power consumption, but your example isn't what will make a difference.
Re:Optimized? (Score:4, Interesting)
Currently: ff 12 tabs, pdf reader, oo.org calc, windows xp in vmware with outlook, azureus, eclipse, pidgin, and I'm often watching videos. Yet incredibly, with 2gb of RAM (standard for a PC) I haven't hit the swap in months.
Take a guess why.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Pointing fingers (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What sort of optimization? (Score:3, Interesting)
Vista is not optimized for... (Score:1, Interesting)
Vista is not optimized for flash memory solid state disk
FALSE.
Vista is not optimized for ANY Hard Drive in existence today.
Like Crysis, it can bring any system down to its knees.
Throw a seagate barracuda @ 7200 RPM and 16MB cache at it and it will slow down the disk.
Throw a WD Caviar black with a 32 MB cache, and it will slow down the disk.
Hell, for fcuk's sake if i use a RAM Disk with 64-bit Vista and a 10 GB RAM disk as non-system disk, it will slow down even RAM by superfetching its crap.
Any software that does not run on current hardware is not worth buying.
Mac OS X Leopard runs on my iBook G4 768MB RAM. I upgraded from Tiger and found Leopard actually is faster. (same was case when i moved from Panther to Tiger).
Hmmm... when will Microsoft learn that upgrading an OS should NOT slow down an existing system.
Two questions (Score:3, Interesting)
My immediate impression is this is somebody trying to blame M$ for their own failings.
How well does this work on Linux (with the various filesystems) and OS/X? Is Vista really doing something stupid, or is it being blamed for the same mistake as everybody else? What about XP?
Other thing is I remember the disk-thrashing bug in Linux Ubuntu. I have it and have to run a startup program to turn off the hard disk power savings to stop the head-park every half second. I did a lot of searching of the web, looking for an explanation of why XP works, and the only real experiments I found indicated that XP just kept reading the disk, so often that it *never* parked the heads. Thus Linux's reduced (but non-zero) use of the disk made things worse. All other tests seemed to indicate they left the power saving settings the same and I never saw any other explanation. This does sound like it might be related to the SSD problems, but those tests were certainly with XP and not Vista-only. Anybody know anything about this?
Re:Pointing fingers (Score:3, Interesting)
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 -
Precisely. Linux WILL have a fix soon, and it will be incorporated into all the major distros at the next release.
When are we going to see a MS filesystem that doesn't suck? (Alright, I thought about it. Make one with a BSD licence...)
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Unbelievable (Score:1, Interesting)
"no apparent reason"? Firstly, Vista does not trash the hard disk at random times. A majority of the time, if no other program is requesting access, the drive stays idle. When it does do something, it's building the search index, building a restore point, ect.
You can either use the Performance Monitor included with Vista, or download one of Mark Russinovich's wonderful tools [microsoft.com] to determine exactly what the disk activity is, if you think it's a problem.
I'd bet hand over fist, 9 out of 10 trolls bitching about disk usage actually have a 3rd party program doing the thrashing, but again, for the lazy mind it's just best to bash Microsoft.
As much as I think Vista is The Suck, I wonder... (Score:3, Interesting)
Unless there is some fairly subtle malinteraction between Vista and one or more SSD chipset, I have difficulty imagining what sort of pathological interaction there could be that wouldn't also create massive havoc for platter HDD setups(which are by far the majority). SSDs lag behind HDDs a bit for long, continuous read or write operations; but absolutely clean up at scattered read/write. A pattern weird enough to give SSDs real trouble would thrash the daylights out of an HDD setup. At worst, one might expect to see naive optimization for HDDs underusing the SSD's talent for ignoring fragmentation; but that wouldn't be a performance crisis. I'm the first to admit that Vista is pretty unimpressive; but my eyebrows are migrating north on this one.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Looking at the system memory tab of activity monitor, do you see pages in / out increase drastically while you have lots of free memory? Do you actually see swap file usage?
Info regarding OS X paging. [macosxhints.com]
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Interesting)
The main problem is that MS is very secretive about proprietary code in their driver stacks, including storage & file system. You can't really blame SSD manufacturers for MS's complete lack of documentation.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Funny how Sandisk is the only one with this pro (Score:1, Interesting)
Beyond that, I saw a recent benchmark showing a new OCZ drive blowing all the rest of the current SSD out of the water in terms of power consumption and performance. Not only that, I believe it was faster than most current hard disks. It the very least it improved the performace/power drain by a factor of ten.
So if it is a Vista problem, it can obviously be worked around. Which makes me think that SanDisk either:
a) Can't make good flash memory at all and are trying to cover for it by blaming the popular scapegoat
or
b) Didn't do their homework and built their product to run in lab perfect scenarios instead the real world and ended up with a bad product.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately, this time its true. We all know how SSDs will wear out over time, we all know how they'll last for 10+ years in normal usage too so its not much of an issue.
However, I run Vista at home, and I find that even with searching turned off, the HDD light is pretty much on all the time, except when I close an app that's used a lot of RAM whereupon it starts thrashing away for a good minute. I expect its readyboost kicking in and re-organising my drive so that app will start up faster next time, but that kind of usage will destroy a SSD in short order.
If the access times for SSDs aren't as good as expected for HDDs, then I expect performance woudl suffer dramatically too.
In this case, SSDs have a certain niche where they provide benefits, but Vista doesn't lend itself to that niche. The trouble the /. crowd has (besides, the usual MS antipathy) is that you'd expect an OS not to thrash the disc quite so much. If the promise of SSD persuades OS manufacturers to improve the way they use the disc (which would give benefits in energy use and overall performance) then it can only be a good thing so I welcome the Vista bashing this time.
Oh, but no-one is attacking MS here - you'll see lots of comments that its all fine on XP - the problem lies with Vista.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, for constant usage some SSDs can use more power than a HD. I would expect any SSD to beat HDDs on power for infrequent use and random access times though, because they don't have to spin up before they can be read from, and don't have to be kept spinning in case of future reads.
operating system or file system? (Score:4, Interesting)
A logical first step would be to decouple the OS from the file system; and then some day to take advantage of improvements like ZFS...
Re:Vista is not optimized for... (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm saying you don't have a 10GB RAM disk, and your assertion that Vista makes RAM run poorly is pure conjecture. Let's say you somehow made a 10GB RAM disk, ignoring for the moment that you would have no RAM to run system, why you would go about installing any programs on a RAM disk is really amazingly stupid, the moment you restarted your computer the program would be annaliated. But clearly you don't have 10GB in your system, or for that matter 10GB of RAM at all, but you're fully willing to give performance descriptions of this imaginary setup, all the way down to the why of "why it runs poorly". THAT is the lie part.
And, as if in an effort to display your complete ignorance, you said:
Please explain why you would make a swap drive out of RAM? Are you so bereft of knowledge about memory management that you don't know that 10GB on a system would never require a swap file? Didn't anyone tell you that a swap file is used when the system cannot use the faster physical memory because there is not enough. Why on earth you have a swap now with 4GB RAM is really beyond my meager understanding, and when you said you'd make an 8GB RAM drive to use as swap file, well, then you really jumped the shark.
All insults aside, If you really want to take advantage of the 4GB you have try shutting off the swap file. For that matter, if you want disk performance, shut off the indexer and system restore too and see if Vista doesn't run faster for you. Vista was really made for people who are going to fuck up their computers, if you promise not to fuck it up, you can turn off all the protection and it will run just as fast as XP on the same hardware. And you'll get the all new DX10 fuzzy feeling when you splash in the water in crysys.
I agree with you however, that crysys is a piece of shit though! I have a 9800GX2 and 4GB and still can't run that bitch in native resolution (1920x1080)! I'll just chalk that up to poor coding, it's not like crytek had a machine that ran the game well, so they had to know it runs like shit. Then, all the reviewers just don't do their jobs. They give it high ratings based on... well, obviously not on playing it.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, this was what I noticed the very first time I had started using Vista.
To clarify, the reason for most of it is at least threefold:
SuperFetch [wikipedia.org], Windows Search Indexing, NTFS Defrag.
I've found that disabling these will cut down on disk access significantly. Especially SuperFetch seem to be a big culprit -- it's "intelligently" loading files to RAM (pretty much any file, not just executables) if it thinks it's about to be used this time of day. For everything but the most regular computer usage patterns, you see how ridiculous of an idea that is. 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 can think of dozens of cases where that prefetcher will be wrong, and I'll prefer saving my hard drive life time in that case.
Re:What sort of optimization? (Score:2, Interesting)
Vista pages very frequently even with 4 Gb ram so i would definitely say its very disk intensive. Couple that with indexing, prefetch and all the other hacks to make up for the performance loss that DRM brings along and you have 24/7 disk activity. I suspect sustained read speads arent an issue but rather spurious writes that happens all the time.
See this for more info or try it out yourself if you have a Vista machine at hand:
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/19553/1141/ [itwire.com]
Re:Newsflash (Score:5, Interesting)
Requires big beefy CPUs and wastes cycles on DRM and other assorted nonsense? Check.
DRM isn't an issue when it comes to CPU utilisation. Especially when you aren't watching anything DRM'ed.
Constantly "optimizes" the disk in background, thereby disabling a power-saving measure? Check.
Well, you got that one right. The optimisation engine is awful, it keeps preloading some DVD ISO's into RAM (6GB worth) and I only have 2GB RAM, so it's obviously overwriting a large chunk of the stuff it just preloaded.
Re:OMG!! (Score:5, Interesting)
I used Vista for a while. I didn't experience any crash, as far as I recall.
But it also happens to be quite resource-hungry, and the interface is (still) terrible.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Interesting)
I have been noticing a very organized Microsoft astroturfing effort myself. If I most anything that is derogatory to Microsoft, it is modded down instantly. No matter if the content is a well thought out point, or just an M$ joke, the Microsoft shills seem to swoop in.
At first I thought it was just some fanboys, however it is to quick, and far to thorough.
I wonder if other here have seen this also?
Cheers
Re:File swapping destroys SSDs (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Static wear levelling/leveling rotate the blocks being written to so both "empty" and "full" blocks are being used, so the amount of free space on the filesystem doesn't matter.
True. Unfortunately, some SSDs don't even implement dynamic wear leveling, and static wear leveling is considered more complex to implement - and so most SSD manufacturers don't implement it!
2. The 100.000 writes often quoted are a guaranteed statistical _minimum_, not a average or a maximum. According to some sources the typical cell will endure 200K-1M writes.
I thought I was careful enough to point out the difference between MLC and SLC Flash RAM. And MLC has an upper limit of 10.000 writes (the more honest vendors put it at 5000). And MLC is far more used in SSDs, than SLC. Sadly.
3. A typical SSD has spare blocks (just as HDD have spare blocks). So when a block is toast it is just marked as "bad" and a spare block is used instead.
Which in no wise different from having, say, a 1% (actually, spare blocks are much less than that) more of free space and using dynamic wear leveling. Those spare blocks change very little in the numbers considered here.
I am disappointed that you use a totally arbitrary number of write/erase cycles (500.000) to support your argument, when the most popular Flash RAM type by far only supports 5000 to 10.000.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Interesting)
He's got a point. Vista even introduces that "Dreamscape" stuff where the screensaver draws off your graphics card to do 3D rendering the entire time you're away.
It even moves the shutdown button elsewhere and put a standby button in its place.
Negligible for each PC but adds up to a lot of unnecessary power draw.