Opinion

posted on 22 July 2008 13:54

Microsoft's Vista O/S has been criticized by SanDisk's CEO for not making good use of solid state disk drives (SSDs).

Eli Harari said during a conference call discussing SanDisk's ugly Q2 fy 08 results: "Vista is not optimized for flash memory solid state disk," and "The next generation controllers need to basically compensate for Vista shortfalls." In other words SanDisk and other suppliers' flash memory products do not enhance the performance of notebooks and desktop PCs running Vista because the O/S is not written to use SSDs fully.

This will be one reason why SanDisk flash memory sales are disappointing; there has been no Vista boost. SanDisk is starting to transition to 3-bit multi-level cell (MLC) flash and expects there to a 4-bit transition next year, both of which will bring down flash memory prices. But the SSD controllers using such MLC flash will somehow need to overcome Vista's flash inadequacies.

It is likely that Apple's faster-moving Mac OS X and Linux notebook operating systems will take advantage of MLC flash much more quickly than Microsoft which is heavily retarded in its ability to innovate in Vista both by its own structure and by the need to retain and test for legacy compatibility.

The problem doesn't exist in netbooks like the Asus Eeee PC because the flash amounts are small and their environment undemanding. A full-blooded Vista environment is different. Harari said: "We are now behind because we did not fully understand, frankly, the limitations in the Vista environment."

Currently adding flash to Vista seems to be like changing the shoes on the hooves of a slow horse; it doesn't do any good. You need to add wings.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}