Which OS Performs Best With SSDs?

Lucas123 writes "Linux, Vista and Mac OS perform differently with solid state disks. While all of them work well with SSDs, as they write data more efficiently or run fewer applications in the background than XP, surprisingly Windows 2000 appears to be the winner when it comes to performance. However, no OS has yet been optimized to work with SSDs. This lost opportunity is one Microsoft plans to address with Windows 7; Apple, too, is likely to upgrade its platform soon for better SSD performance."

Windows 2000 is fastest of Windows and Mac OSX OSs

[corsec67]

They didn't compare anything to Linux, so I just have one question:

How easy would it be to modify Windows 2000 to be even better? Replace the file systems, alter the way the kernel writes to the drive, etc?

Awful article

[Nick Ives]

It conflates the results of several independent tests to form the view that XP is somehow best. It also bandies about meaningless numbers like one OS being x% faster than another without giving any hint of the metric.

Avoid.

Do we just need a new filesystem?

[timeOday]

Filesystems are fundamentally engineered to cope with the high latency of hard drives, so I'd imagine there are a lot of assumptions to unlearn. But what other implications are there for the OS? Since the tradeoffs between RAM and persistent storage are smaller with SSD, maybe the changes should go beyond the filesystem into the virutal memory system?

Re:Windows 2000 is fastest of Windows and Mac OSX

[Malc]

What is your criteria for a different file system? NTFS is already a very good one for most of the important criteria.

Re:Linux, as a matter of fact

[Anonymous Coward]

from TFA: "Linux is "always faster" than Vista or Mac OS X"

Nevers run anything in the background? You what?

[Viol8]

FTA:

"Linux is "always faster" than Vista or Mac OS X -- to the tune of 1% to 2% -- because like Windows 2000, "it never runs anything in the background."

I'm sorry , what? Have these people never heard of daemon processes? What the hell are they talking about?
If this is their level of expertise I think I'd take any tests they do with a whole cellar full of salt.

Article is bullshit

[francium de neobie]

When I read into the middle, it says,

According to Far, Mac OS X runs "a little faster than Vista" with an SSD drive, but Linux is "always faster" than Vista or Mac OS X -- to the tune of 1% to 2% -- because like Windows 2000, "it never runs anything in the background."

Ok, so Linux and Windows 2000 never run anything in the background. My head exploded so I stopped reading.

it's not clear to me what's being measured

[Trepidity]

The article is all over the map, discussing in vague terms everything from boot-up speed to I/O speed to some sort of generic "runs a little faster" that I assume (?) means overall system or app benchmark performance.

When actual numbers are quoted, they sound somewhere between questionable and boring. The article quotes all sorts of differences in the range of 1% and 2%. Leaving aside the question of what this is a 2% difference in, and whether a difference that small is even consistently measurable outside of sampling error and quirks of their particular setup, does it actually matter? I'm certainly not going to choose an OS based on a 2% difference in SSD performance.

Why would I care?

[Trillan]

Even if their methodology was clear.
Even if their methodology was valid.
Even if every percentage point was accurate.
Even if all of their arguments were valid.
(And none of these are true.)
Why would I care enough about 5% to let that pick my OS?

Re:Confusing article

[James McP]

I find this a little scary too: Microsoft also plans a certification program for SSDs

TFA: "Microsoft also plans a certification program for SSDs so that the drives properly identify themselves to Windows 7 and prioritize data I/O for the SATA interface. "

While MS is known for embrace-extend-engulf, this is nothing to panic over. If the drive passes a string that identifies it as an SSD, Win7 (or any other OS) will use different disk control logic than they will for an HDD. All OSes will benefit if there's a clear way of identifying SSDs; MS, Linux, Apple, Sun, IBM, all of 'em. Change the preferred block size, alter garbage management, adjust caching to deal with 1 ms response times, (typically) fast reads,(typically) slow writes, etc.

Who cares right now?

[NineNine]

Obviously, SSD's are in their infancy. NO OS has been even remotely optimized for them yet, I'm sure (except maybe the big hitters, like Solaris). I'd be willing to be my left leg that the next version of every commercial OS (OSX, Windows, Linux*) is optimized for them. This article is irrelevant.

Re:Windows 2000 is fastest of Windows and Mac OSX

[nonewmsgs]

the source of windows 2000 was leaked a few years ago. http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/15/71552/7795 [kuro5hin.org]

What's wrong with this picture?

[flajann]

This article fails in several respects:

1. Linux, a very major OS, is not even included in their tests.
2. A proper test would not have ANYTHING running in the background.
3. Issues such as how much read and write caching the OS does will affect performance.
4. Article does not list a performance table or chart -- but perhaps I missed that.
5. The actual File System used is really at issue here, but the article did not mention anything about File Systems from what I could tell.
6. Defragging a SSD? Shouldn't need that. And obviously defragging schemes which were written for magnetic hard drives will probably be less than optimal for the SSD anyway.
7. Article, as far as I could tell, did not cite the benchmarking methodology used.

Overall, I would state that this article is useless beyond "cocktail gossip." And really, SSD should have a specific FS written to its peculiarities, which would, of course, render the "OS" questions moot.

Re:Windows 2000 is fastest of Windows and Mac OSX

[ThePhilips]

LOL.

I had in past run a Windows server for about 2 years. And it was terribly slow, despite the fact that in the beginning it was blazingly fast. I believe it was O&O Defrag which actually returned the server to life: downtime on Sunday with boot time defragmentation did the miracle.

Same thing in the company I work for right now: IT recently took off net two file servers and exchange server to defragment file systems, because FS performance went considerably down. Folks have said that they "lose to fragmentation 30% of FS performance," meaning that system works about twice faster after defragmentation. That's why they schedule at least one down time for every windows server in company.

Whatever synthetic benchmarks people perform - it is irrelevant.

Long term real life experience tells otherwise.

Re:Do we just need a new filesystem?

[MattBD]

I'd heard of Btrfs, but I didn't know it had an SSD optimised mode. That could be REALLY handy for music players and netbooks.

Re:Windows 2000 is fastest of Windows and Mac OSX

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

depends on your definition of crash. Having a slower HD will cause disk IO to stack under heavy load. What is the real difference between a server that has crashed, and one that doesn't respond? Fragmented disks will have the possibility of a similar effect. The linked article measures the difference between a disk that is 7.5% fragmented and after its been defragged. 7.5% isn't much. It really depends upon which files have been fragmented. If they are rarely accessed data files, then obviously there isn't going to be much of a performance difference. If they are frequently accessed, then the difference would be huge. I've seen desktops that topped out at 30% fragmentation. The performance after dragging is night and day. Its much more important for me to have consistent performance ( due to automatic reallocation of files when they would be fragmented) than a gradual slowdown that requires downtime for defragmentation.

Note, haven't run windows in production servers for the past ten years. But I don't think NTFS has changed that much since then.

Re:Weird article.

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to say it, but Apple OS X IS a Unix OS...

Re:No optimized OS = false

[nvrrobx]

With all due respect, I call shenanigans on your logic here. OpenSolaris is just as much of a desktop OS as Linux is. Have you looked at the hardware it supports and what runs on it recently?

The word "desktop" isn't even mentioned in the article anywhere.

After reading TFA, it all feels a bit vague anyhow. I see no real performance results, just a few percentages thrown around.

Re:Do we just need a new filesystem?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Well, the article is crap in many ways -- doesn't cite what benchmarks they actually used, just throws around meaningless percentages and outright lies (Linux and Win2k absolutely do run things in the background).

One of the other little details they left out is which filesystem they used, on any platform. My guess is, they just used the default -- I wonder if they were even aware of alternatives (you can install Win2k on FAT32, if you really want).

So, to answer your comment, Linux has at least two filesystems that are designed to work directly on solid-state media. Unfortunately, most SSDs pretend to be ATA hard drives, but the point still stands -- Linux has many filesystems. I wonder which one actually performs best on that ATA drive?

Re:Article is bullshit

[CommandoCody]

Funny, Googling "disable spotlight indexing" for Mac OS X turns up plenty of hits. Oh, wait, you can even do it right from the Spotlight Preference Pane. Look at that!

Re:Windows 2000 is fastest of Windows and Mac OSX

[operagost]

I think you mean "head", not "needle", unless we're talking about 33 RPM vinyl discs here.

Fragmentation doesn't affect SSDs

[200_success]

The point of the article is that solid state drives have different performance characteristics than hard disks. Since SSDs are random-access devices, fragmentation does not increase seek time. Therefore, it makes sense that a filesystem that doesn't try to worry about fragmentation could perform better on SSDs.