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, Funny)
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Funny)
I heard that Vista causes cancer, kicks puppies, and is responsible for global warming.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Funny)
My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to be uninstalled.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Funny)
RMS never told you what happened to your father. Vista is your father.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Funny)
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: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:4, Funny)
What's so impressive about his ID number?
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Informative)
Every time you boot into Vista, god kills a little kitten!
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Funny)
In Vista Ultimate Signature Edition you get to choose the kitten.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:4, Insightful)
Why? It's true!
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Informative)
How can this be informative?
I'm afraid some moderators have a sense of humour ;-)
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Funny)
Take those moderators and have them sacked. And those folks responsible for the credits, too.
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.
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: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: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
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Funny)
I heard that Vista causes cancer, kicks puppies, and is responsible for global warming.
So, it's not actually as bad as they say it is?
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Ahh, but SSD's will consume less power.
Can I get a +1 backOnTopic please :-)
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.
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.
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:Unbelievable (Score:5, Insightful)
Not once you get Vista running on it.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Informative)
I'm running Ubuntu 8.04 on my desktop computer at the moment. That is,
P4 2.66GHz
512MB of RAM
GeForce2 MX400 graphics card
No overclocking, no tricks, running the latest version of Ubuntu with far more 3d eye-candy than Aero is capable of, every service on, a crap load of extra packages installed, including server software (such as mySQL and Apache) running in the background, running Firefox with 10 tabs on one desktop, Evolution on another, xChat on the third, and Rhythmbox, Skype and Pidgeon on the fourth, and it's still nice and responsive.
I'd be lucky to get Vista to even install, let alone run Aero and programs as well...
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, Informative)
Hello, by 'reasonably modern hardware' do you mean those newfangled silent,fast SSD drive thingies? I think I read somewhere that Vista doesnt play nice with them.
Maybe you mean the latest CPUs comming out the Fabs, like the Atom and Via low power chips. I may have read a story about a hardware company (I think is was Asus) producing a low power device (the Eaaa PC?) that runs the latest Linux, but for the Windows version, they chose Windows XP over Vista for performance reasons.
Perhaps you mean new hardware designs like the Cell architecture and other SMP designs coming to a Blade Center near you. The NT base for Vista has a shitty scheduler, and appears to require 1 NIC per CPU for good performance, which is going to make 32-way CPUs rather expensive if you want to run Windows.
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 [engadget.com], pffft.
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:5, Funny)
Um, my dog runs pretty fast.
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: (Score:3, Funny)
I've run Vista Home Premium on an Asus Eee PC (with 4GB SSD) and it runs just fine. And quick. I have no idea what they are complaining about.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Unbelievable (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.modaco.com/content/asus-eee-pc-http-www-eeeasy-com/261965/installing-vista-on-the-eee-ive-done-it-and-it-works/ [modaco.com]
So it looks like it is possible...
Not rushing to do it on my Eee though!
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Insightful)
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: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: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: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.
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:5, Informative)
Linux already runs just fine on Flash devices, and has done for many years - there are filesystems optimised for flash, and many embedded devices that use Linux on Flash, e.g. GPS devices (TomTom, Garmin), WiFi/DSL/Cable routers (most of them), etc, etc. There are also consumer distros that run really well from USB flash drives, e.g. Damn Small Linux, Slack, Puppy and many others.
Re:Linux does. (Score:4, Informative)
Because you've put it in quotes, I suspect it's sarcasm, right?
Because I wasn't exaggerating. There actually is a filesystem, for Linux, deliberately written for flash: JFFS2 [wikipedia.org]. It actually will not work on a hard drive without an additional layer of emulation, and it wouldn't perform as well or be as reliable as on a real flash drive.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Unbelievable (Score:4, Funny)
I swear at XP myself.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I swear at Tourette's patients.
(And if any post cried out to be modded Redundant, this would be the one).
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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!"
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (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
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: (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".
What sort of optimization? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, 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: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.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Take a guess why.
It hung up a few hours ago and no one has rebooted yet ?
Re:Optimized? (Score:5, Funny)
You forgot to run swapon?
It is not just vista... (Score:5, Informative)
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++
Re:It is not just vista... (Score:4, Informative)
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: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.
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.
Re:File swapping destroys SSDs (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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.
Obligatory matrix misquote (Score:5, Funny)
"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. (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: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).
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:Funny how Sandisk is the only one with this pro (Score:5, Informative)
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:
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)."
that's one way to look at it (Score:5, Informative)
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).
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe, but it is insane to develop hardware to suit software. Far too many types of software will want to use the same hardware, you can't optimize for them all. It is far more logical, far more rational, to optimize the hardware for the task, and leave it to software on the device or drivers on the host machine to present a suitable view for the operating system. Any remaining problems are for the OS to take care of. If the OS doesn't, that's the OS' problem, not the hardware's.
In this case, let's take the
Famous quote (Score:5, Funny)
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?
Re:Famous quote (Score:4, Informative)
> "The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool." -Unknown
Perhaps you are misquoting George Bernard Shaw:
"Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people."
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.)
Re:Ya, it is Vista's fault... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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).
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?
SANDISK has been caught in a lie here. (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.sandisk.com/Corporate/PressRoom/PressReleases/PressRelease.aspx?ID=3785 [sandisk.com]
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.
Vista is the same as XP in this respect (Score:4, Informative)
The problem SanDisk had is they expected the OS to batch writes to an erase block size (at least 128Kb) and were surprised to find this isn't how operating systems typically work. That's not specific to Vista; it applies to every previous release of Windows, and most other mainstream OSes.
On random writes, the performance of SSDs is terrible, since they need to perform read/modify/write on every small write. So sequential write performance looks fine, and random write performance looks bad.
What filesystem guarantees to write its metadata (directories, bitmaps, etc) in 128/256Kb chunks? None do. Every time the filesystem writes a small chunk of data, the disk has to work extra hard. Any app writing small, random chunks also performs badly (eg Outlook); this is true on XP and Vista (equally.)
Really, SanDisk would have been well advised to speak to OS developers (any) before releasing their first attempt at and SSD. Experience with removable flash (typically file copies) does not equate to experience with fixed disk scenarios (eg registry & log flushes.)
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.
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: (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.
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.
Re: (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: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Pointing fingers (Score:4, Funny)
So basically, Vista murders your disks? Steve Ballmer should be worried. Didn't they put Hans Reiser in jail for something like this?
NTFS, Linux, and Modern Filesystems (Score:5, Informative)
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.
I don't know if you're blatantly lying or just very misinformed.
Let's take age and revisions first. Ext2 was introduced to Linux in January 1993. NTFS was introduced to Windows in July 1993 (in NT 3.1). So your implication that NTFS is much older than ext is nonsense.
You say that there have been "only minor" revisions to NTFS in comparison to ext2. Ext2 has in fact had only one (stable) revision, ext3, and it introduced only one new feature, journalling (something NTFS has had from the start). Various new revisions of NTFS, on the other hand, have added: transparent compression, named streams, disk quotas, filesystem-level encryption, sparse files, reparse points, update sequence number journaling, $Extend, distributed link tracking, and atomic transactioning, among others.
Some of these features, such as sparse files, are things that ext2 has had from the start. But many, such as transparent compression and file-system level encryption, are not only not, but have even now not found their way into mainstream Linux. To take those two features as an example, the only filesystems even close to mainstream that have them are Resier4 and ZFS, neither of which are ready for widespread use in Linux.
You say "Vista still uses the same basic NTFS layout and associated algorithms that were finalised around 10 years ago" -- conventiently not mentioning that that that 'ten-year-old layout policy' uses a number of modern layout features, such as extents, that have also still not yet found their way into mainstream Linux (ext4 and Reiser4 both support them, but neither are yet out of beta; neither ext3 nor ReiserFS 3 do). Directory contents in NTFS, incidentally, is stored as a B+ tree, which is the same structure that ReiserFS uses due to its scalability.
Re:what about linux? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I wonder what he means (Score:4, Informative)
Vista does lots and lots of writing - especially lots of small writes... Then again so does XP - just Vista does more.
Trust me, Vista is vicious to a hard drive. I got a new Quad6600 with 3GB and it felt slow... sometimes absolutely crawling because it had a slower 8MB cache 500GB drive installed. I finally figured out that the HD was the performance bottle neck. I just bought a WD Velociraptor (10K RPM 32MB cache) for $300 and my computer feels about twice as fast for daily usage.
Re:I wonder what he means (Score:5, Informative)
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.