Windows 7 will be more SSD-friendly
Microsoft has unveiled steps to make solid state drives run far more efficiently in Windows 7. It’s the third boost for the technology announced this week.
Leading manufacturer SanDisk has just announced a new filewriting system, which makes much more effective use of the drive’s physical set-up. That should boost speeds as much as a hundred-fold while extending the drive’s lifetime. The firm also introduced a system for learning a computer’s behavior and grouping data together so that the drive works better with common Vista applications.
Both improvements, while useful, were still making the best of a bad situation in that Windows simply isn’t set-up to work efficiently with SSDs. That’s because the drives are split into larger sections than traditional drives, and each section is larger than the amount of data Windows can handle at any one time.
Microsoft doesn’t seem to be ready to deal with that issue yet. However, it has revealed four changes that are debuting in Windows 7 and should improve SSD performance:
- Windows will no longer attempt to defragment an SSD. (Defragmentation is not only unnecessary with SSD, but can decrease a drive’s lifespan.)
- It will include a special feature to handle the deletion of data on SSDs more intelligently, which should make for faster access and reduced physical wear.
- There will be more efficient disk partitions to cut down how often a computer has to access an SSD. (This will only work on fresh installs rather than upgrades.)
- Microsoft will certify SSDs to make sure they are properly recognised as a solid state drive in Windows and thus benefit from the new features.
It’s welcome news for the SSD industry, if not a complete solution. For example, some SSD manufacturers still believe Windows needs a separate technology for using SSDs rather than adapting the ATA system which controls traditional drives.
The problem is that hardware development doesn’t always coincide with the software industry’s schedule. It’s probably going to be at least 2010 before SSDs are cheap enough to have widespread appeal, and that may well be too late for Microsoft to make it an even bigger priority while developing Windows 7.
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November 16th, 2008
How do you have “reduced physical wear” on a solid state device???