SanDisk blames product delays on Vista
By John Lister
Memory card manufacturer SanDisk has blamed the design of Vista for delays to its planned range of solid-state drives (SSDs).
Unlike traditional flash-based memory cards, SSDs have a high enough capacity that they can replace traditional hard drives. In theory they are more effective because they are quicker to access, are virtually silent and, having no moving parts, are much less vulnerable to mechanical data.
However, because they currently work out more expensive, and smaller physical sizes aren’t always possible for high-spec SSDs, they tend to only appear in top-of-the-range laptops at the moment, including the Macbook Air.
SanDisk has planned a new range of SSDs in which each electrical element can store more than one piece of information at a time. The idea is that this would help solve the cost and space problems for higher-capacity drives and make SSDs a genuinely practical alternative, particularly in laptops. The firm is working on models as large as 256GB.
The problem, according to SanDisk, is that it’s been too troublesome to make the technology work with Vista. The company’s CEO Eli Harari (pictured) told stockholders that Vista simply isn’t designed for optimal performance with SSDs: “The next generation controllers need to basically compensate for Vista shortfalls.”
This means the range will be delayed into next year while SanDisk works out a way to combat the problem and get marketable performance for its drives running under Vista. “I’d say that we are now behind because we did not fully understand, frankly, the limitations in the Vista environment,” Harari claimed.
The company certainly needed to come up with some explanations following poor quarterly results which sent its stock price to the lowest level in five years. It appears an over-supply of memory cards across the industry is driving prices down. Indeed, SanDisk has delayed work to expand a production plant shared with Toshiba.
It’s difficult to tell how much of Harari’s comments on Vista are a legitimate complaint and how much is down to making excuses. But given Microsoft’s dominance of the operating system market, it does seem feasible it could afford to put more efforts into working with hardware manufacturers to make sure Windows 7 is as compatible as possible with developing technology.
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