“SanDisk said Monday that Windows Vista is not optimized for solid state drives, delaying the delivery of optimized drives until next year,” Brooke Crothers reports for CNET.
Crothers reports, “Solid state drives (SSDs) are used instead of hard disk drives in select high-end notebook PCs today such as the Apple MacBook Air and Toshiba Portege R500.”
MacDailyNews Take: Sounds like Toshiba’s SOL then, huh? Unless you like limiting yourself to running a bloated upside-down and backwards OS that’s not optimized for your storage hardware while concurrently prohibiting yourself access to the world’s most advanced operating system along with reams of best-in-class applications. Get a Mac – you can even slum it with Windows when you want to see how poorly you can make your SSD perform.
Crothers continues, “Speaking during SanDisk’s second-quarter earnings conference call, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer 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. This is due to Vista’s design. ‘The next generation controllers need to basically compensate for Vista shortfalls,’ he said.”
MacDailyNews Take: Great. Bastardize your hardware design in order to compensate for Microsoft’s ineptitude. Do we all get to use these drives that will offer controllers that are designed around Vista’s shortfalls? Oh, the excitement.
Crothers continues, “‘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. Harari said this challenge alone is putting SanDisk behind schedule. ‘We have very good internal controller technology, as you know…That said, I’d say that we are now behind because we did not fully understand, frankly, the limitations in the Vista environment,’ he added.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: For what, exactly, is Windows Vista optimized, besides lining a convicted monopoly abuser’s pockets and forcing hardware purchases on people who haven’t yet figured out that what they really want is an Apple Mac?
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Davis Machead” for the heads up.]
Is Vista even optimized for use with standard hard drives?
@MDN:
You should have statement: Oh, the excrement!
That would have been more appropriate.
this cant be a surprise to anyone..
Vista stinks, so the hardware manufacturer is going to stink up its hardware too?
Unbelievable! When will everyone learn…..
question, what exactly *is* Vista optimized for?
Eric Willard is a moron.
Billy Gates is a moron.
Steve Ballmer is a moron.
Windows (Vista) buyers are morons.
Sorry.
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Vista is fully optimised.
Vista is fully and perfectly optimised for
cash flow.
Yeh, good question. What exactly is Vista optimized for??
Anyone? Zune Tang?
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Q: What exactly *is* Vista optimized for??
A: Read/Write HD DVDs?
A: Licensing?
P.S. – How does Linux do with SSD? Cause that might help out the nice folks at Toshiba.
@ Incredulous
Looks like they are teaming. Just not the way you the consumer would expect.
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But Windows 7, some time off in the future, will be perfect. It’ll even be optimized for big ass, interactive furniture.
Hopefully Apple will continue to get non-Vista-compensating SSDs.
What *is* Vista optimized for?
Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
How is this exactly going to affect me until SSDs come down further in price?
“What *is* Vista optimized for?”
Floppies.
@MDN “Do we all get to use these drives that will offer controllers that are designed around Vista’s shortfalls?”
They are referring to the controller chips on the motherboard. The drives themselves won’t be Vista optimised, because then they’d lock themselved out of the server market.
More to the point, does anyone know if Mac OS X is optimized for SSD drives?
And what exactly does it mean to “optimize for SSD drives”?!?
As far as I’m aware, all hard drives for notebooks present a SATA (or ATA-100) interface to the host CPU, so why should the operating system know or care whether the internal drive mechanism is magnetic platters or solid state?
I’m speculating that SanDisk is blowing a little smoke here, blaming Vista for SanDisk’s tardiness or design choices. To test whether SanDisk is blowing smoke or is on to something real, it would be interesting to know whether other SSD manufacturers are facing the same issues with Vista, and if so, what they did to prevent or avoid the problem.
Ampar: if vista is optimized for floppies, and a little googling shows that vista installs can reach 8 gigs, and comes compressed on one dvd…….
isn’t that about 3000+ floppies?
did MS ship a gold master floppy stack?
Sorta funny – this article (when I read it) was displaying a large ad for the MacBook Air!!!
SOMEONE has gotten that right, huh?
@shen
Yes, there is a stack of gold master floppies for Vista, this is Micro Soft we are talking about here…
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I’m not convinced yet that SanDisk has a real complaint, but if it does, how do you know that the MacBook Air with SSD doesn’t suffer from the same performance problems that SanDisk is mentioning?
All these SSDs — whether used with Vista or Mac OS X — are first generation products, and as with any 1.0 product, I would expect them to have performance, stability, manufacturing, and pricing issues.
“I’m speculating that SanDisk is blowing a little smoke here, blaming Vista for SanDisk’s tardiness or design choices. To test whether SanDisk is blowing smoke or is on to something real, it would be interesting to know whether other SSD manufacturers are facing the same issues with Vista, and if so, what they did to prevent or avoid the problem.”
Exactly. This is just bullshit because SanDisk’s SSD products are inferior to their competition. You don’t hear Samsung SSDs having any “Vista” issues. Hell, Macs are using the same damn Intel SATA drive controllers as everyone else.
Recent SSD drive performance vs. platter drive performance numbers under Vista x64: http://techreport.com/articles.x/15079/8
Scapegoat, anyone?
Apple MacBook Air and Toshiba Portege R500
The Lenvo Thinkpad beats the MacBook Air soundly, weighs the same and it has a DVD drive.
I just can imagine the horror of attempting to install Windows on a MacBook Air.
Mac OS X, or OS X is running iPod Touches and iPhones right now using SSD’s. I would say we do not have this to worry about.
@Raving MacHead
Actually installing Windows on the MacBook Air is not that bad really. Its just a little more complicated as in plug in usb cd rom but other than that it wasn’t bad.