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The recent tempest in a benchmark over the true value of SSDs over HDDs has slowly faded with no one really moved from their beliefs. At this point, you either like SSds and feel they are the wave of the future, or feel they are an expensive novelty and will stick with your hard drive, thank you very much.

It seems however, that the lack of the spectacular improvements in speed and heat production that were promised by SSD developers may not be due to a flaw in the technology, but rather in the operating systems controlling them.

It appears that Samsung and Windows are now working to improve the way Vista reads data from SSDs.

According to Michael Yang, flash marketing manager at Samsung, the speed and way in which SSDs get and store data is totally different then that used by conventional hard drives. The two drives styles differ vastly in terms of optimal packet sizes for data transfers and the best ways to read and write files, for example.

Recently Infoworld spoke to experts about the problems facing solid state drives in a spinning world, and got some interesting answers:

There is a mismatch in the way Windows Vista handles data sizes on hard drive and SSDs, Gregory Wong, an analyst with Forward Insights said. Vista has been optimized to handle hard-drive data in smaller chunks. In contrast, the sector size — also known as page size — of SSDs are larger than hard drive sector sizes. That results in inefficient SSD performance when slotted into a disk drive bay, Wong said.

"My guess is that [Samsung and Microsoft] are maybe working on the OS recognizing an SSD with a 4KB sector size instead of a hard disk drive with a 512-byte sector size," Wong said.

In addition, Samsung has announced that they will be releasing a 128GB SSD soon, with a 256GB drive in production by the end of the year. If we can soon see a version of Windows optimized to run SSDs of that capacity, perhaps those vapourwear like advantages to SSDs may yet be a reality.

(Source – Infoworld)

Zealot (446 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).