Microsoft: Windows 7 to boost solid-state drives
Updated at 3:40 p.m.with additional comments and clarifications about solid state drives and ATA commands.
Will solid-state drives thrive on Windows 7? Microsoft is set to address that question at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference this week.
Microsoft will speak to both overall support for solid-state drives and Windows 7 support for Netbooks in Los Angeles at WinHEC 2008, which kicks off Wednesday.
In a conference abstract titled "Windows 7 Enhancements for Solid-State Drives," Microsoft states that "PC systems that have solid-state drives are shipping in increasing volumes" and that it is planning "Windows enhancements that take advantage of the latest updates to standardized command sets, such as ATA."
"Windows7 will be able to identify a SSD uniquely," according to Gregory Wong of Forward Insights. Certain ATA commands will improve the speed that solid state drives write to disk, Wong said.
ATA is most commonly associated with Serial ATA, or SATA, technology, which is the most popular data transfer standard for PC storage devices. Most new hard drives use the SATA-2 standard, and the newest solid-state drives are based on this standard also.
Until recently, solid-state drives used an older--and theoretically slower--PATA (Parallel ATA) standard. But the newest drives shipping with, for example, the Dell Latitude E4200 and HP EliteBook 2530p ultraportable laptops, use SATA-2.
"It is pretty widely held that SSDs are unlikely to meet with much acceptance until Windows undergoes significant tuning to take advantge of all the speed that SSDs have to offer," according to Jim Handy of Los Gatos, Calif.-based Objective Analysis.
Topics covered in the Microsoft SSD talk will include "file system optimizations" and "thoughts on the future of SSDs and their role in Windows," according to a prepared statement by Frank Shu, a senior program manager on the Windows Storage Platform team.
Another session, titled "Designing Flash-Based Netbooks for Windows 7," will cover how to design flash-based Netbooks using Windows 7, according to a statement by Leon Braginski, a senior lead program manager in Microsoft's PC3 team. "We will explain how to calculate the lifetime of a flash-based netbook based on specific workload numbers," a summary states.
The session will also "introduce a revised version of the Flash-Based PC Design Guide, which has been updated for Windows 7."
Other solid-state drive related talks include one by Seagate, titled "Is Your Disk Drive Going Away?" Seagate will talk about solid-state drive platforms and hybrid hard-disk drives (HDDs), among other topics.
Retail flash memory drive giant SanDisk will talk about Multi-level Cell (MLC) NAND in PCs. MLC technology allows solid-state drive suppliers to build higher-capacity drives at lower cost. The latest high-capacity 128GB solid-state drives are based on MLC.
"Analysts uniformly agree that the key challenge to solid-state drive adoption is reducing cost, and the key to reducing cost is advancing to multi-level cell technology," SanDisk said in a statement.
"The PC pushes MLC flash like no other application with its high random write rate, small block size and long life expectations. SanDisk has...introduced the first metric for SSD endurance--Long-term Data Endurance (LDE). LDE allows customers to evaluate the lifespan of an SSD in their application," SanDisk said.
Brooke Crothers has served as an editor at large at CNET News, an editor at Dow Jones' Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly, and a senior editor at InfoWorld. His CNET blog covers chip technology and computer systems, and how they define the computing experience. He also contributes to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. Follow Brooke on Twitter @mbrookec. 
Also, Windows read/write optimizations and caching patterns are based on a disk model. SSD's do not behave the same way, so those optimizations can actually become a hindrance.
- by Penguinisto November 4, 2008 5:57 PM PST
- Lerianis: Not really. Right now, Linux supports more devices than any other OS. This happened not because hardware makers woke up one day and thought "hmm... maybe we should all write for Linux now".
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- by wolivere November 5, 2008 12:45 PM PST
- I actually have found linux personally to not support as many devices. Looking in my stash of devices I have Adaptec Raid controllers that do not work. I have a canon SCSI 35mm negative reader that will not work. I have an NEC SCSI Cdrom that wont work.
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- by JasonCe November 5, 2008 12:48 PM PST
- "Penguenisto", please go spread your FUD on slashdot. Everybody knows that Windows has way more device support than any other OS in the universe.
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- by Penguinisto November 13, 2008 4:40 PM PST
- @ jasonCe: prove it.
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(6 Comments)Instead, it took a concerted effort from the Linux community - to reach out and make inroads with hardware makers, and to do for Linux what hardware makers don't do for them.
A bit of insight into how and why can be had here: http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2008/10/how-linux-supports-more-device.html
Microsoft needs to do more of this. They do some, but more often than not, they rely on hardware makers to do the job instead. Sure, marketshare helps make this happen in most cases, but as the balance continues to shift away from Microsoft and towards Linux and OSX, MSFT is going to have to stop demanding, and start accommodating.
"but as the balance continues to shift away from Microsoft and towards Linux "
That has been the herald since the 90's. yet Linux at the desktop is stagnant not even breaking 1%. On the server side they are doing well at replacing UNIX, and SUN, but have not eroded much of the MS world.
And as the article stated they have issues with companies that do not work with them to write drivers. And yes this project is doing well, but over the past 10 years I can not tell you how many great Linux projects I have watched die on the vine.
Lastley if a vendor makes a driver the screws you up, you have a someone to call someone to sue someone to complain about. When the NVIDIA driver issue surfaced with Ubuntu with poor EDID probing the corrupted some LCD panels EDID requiring EDID reprograming or RMA'ing monitors.
When I went searching all I got was "known" issue... errr not good enough.
I am sorry I am of the other belief. If you make hardware you better make drivers for it. You as the hardware maker understand your hardware.
Like I said its nice they have 300 volunteers working on this project. But I will be happy if 2 years from now its still around.
I am sick and tired of people like you trying to use public posts like these to push your personal ideology onto other people. If you like Linux (and please if you want to cover it up, choose an alias that doesn't have "penguin" in it), that is fine. But don't spread FUD about other platforms, just make your platform better.
@ wolivere: Seriously - when an OS can run on anything from ARM procs to z-Series mainframes, and support a vast number of devices (and yes, far more than Windows), of ages ranging from teh 1980's to today and beyond? Sorry, but your assertions don;t stand up to facts.
PS: you can't sue MSFT either if your device isn;t supported. In fact, you can't sue them for anything their product does (or does not do).