Samsung & Microsoft to tune up Vista for solid state drives
By John Lister
Samsung is in talks with Microsoft to find a solution to the problem of solid state drives (SSDs) not working as effectively as they should in Vista.
SSDs, which have no moving parts, are generally regarded as quicker, quieter and sturdier than normal hard drives. While they are currently more expensive, many believe they could eventually become the best choice for laptops.
The problem is that Windows, logically enough, has always been optimised for working with traditional hard drives. SSDs have a larger page size, which is to say that they are split into fewer but larger sections than a regular hard drive.
It appears Vista (like all previous versions of Windows) is set up to work with a specific maximum ‘chunk’ at a time which is smaller than the individual sections on an SSD. This means that, while perfectly functional, the SSD doesn’t run as efficiently as possible.
According to one analyst, the talks could lead to a fairly significant change in the way Vista recognises SSDs. Gregory Wong told PC World that he estimated Vista might be revamped so that the maximum size section it recognises increases from 512k to 4MB.
Samsung didn’t talk specific figures, but says its talks with Microsoft are designed to find the most practically efficient limit. The talks come at an important time as Samsung is launching a 128GB range later this year, and will then almost immediately begin production work on a 256GB model.
This isn’t the first time SSD manufacturers have found problems with Vista. Eli Harari, the CEO of SanDisk, recently blamed delays to a new line of smaller and cheaper disks on the problems his engineers found in making the disks optimally efficient in Vista.
While it will be interesting to see how Microsoft responds and whether it makes any major revamps to Vista (presumably in Service Pack 2), the priority may lie in making sure Windows 7 is able to work as efficiently as possible with both SSDs and traditional drives. If recent trends continue, then by 2010 SSDs may very well be economical and practical enough for the mass market – as long as their advantages can be fully exploited in Windows.
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September 21st, 2008
Developed these tricks for a eee PC 1000. It should work for XP, Vista, and Outlook 2003 / 2007.
Read it here:
http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=44736
http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=44928
The gist is XP / Vista were architectured for very small amounts of DRAM, and relatively slow hard drives.
Techniques like caching, prefetch, etc. are all intended to optimize for mechanical hard drives.
SSDs basically read small, random files fast, (with out the need for regular defrag), but write very slowly especially if the data is in large blocks (which means it has to erase an entire block just to write a file that may take only 1% of the size of the block).
A mechanical hard drive can write 2 bytes and ignore the rest of the space in an 8k block. An SSD has to erase an entire 8k block just to write 2 bytes.
Programs like Outlook that writes lots of small files are a killer.
So the fix is real simple — use very small sized clusters, 512k in my case, and then turn off a lot of unnecessary disk activity that an SSD do not need, like NT Journaling, writing the date and time of last access, etc.
Also, do not use SSD for a page file if at all possible — too much writes.
Because SSDs have a potential failure mode where the entire block can fail (or drive) rather than a hard drive’s more forgiving partial failure, I also recommend that you backup the Outlook pst or ost files to an entirely different drive regularly.
Good luck.