So many Microsoft fanboys it's not even funny.

The guy has a point, fair and square, but apparently pointing anything about a particular characteristic of an OS is like picking on somebody's religion.

You know a flame and fanboi sentiment when you see flames without 'supporting documentation'. SSD ain't the only thing that isn't optimized under Vista. Given Microsoft's track record for antitrust issues, you think programmers/designers have a lot of time and support to fix optimization issues? Sandisk makes one comment, and lo behold! The entire SSD market gets flamed. Scapegoat indeed.

Uh.. people are missing the point. There's nothing wrong with Vista.

The guy in the article is talking about making optimizations in the controller. He also mentions that consumer drives like 8, 16GB, etc. are good for low-end systems, but can't handle higher-ended tasks.

What the dirve manufactuers are referring too is Vista changes the way the system uses the hard drive. Not on a physical write too much problem (Vista's SuperFetch and indexing will kill your SSD? Give me a break!!).

It's the fact that end users access patterns are changing from single user to more multi-user style systems. As one person aptly noted DOS is single threaded and you can tell when it uses the disk. The increase in cores and the number of running processes in Vista or any other modern OS (Even Linux!) means internally that a desktop runs more like a server, so, you need to use enterprise class algorithms in your SSD controller to "compensate for Vista", or in other words "compensate for multi-user workloads."

It's the same as putting a consumer hard drive in a enterprise class server and expecting it to work. The firmware on the drive is different to give it single user or multi-user performance characteristics. It's no wonder a desktop hard disk sucks, it's engineered towards a different type of workload. Same goes for consumer level SSD's.

You'll notice a world of difference in Vista with a good Mobo, a good enterprise class SATA disk (like the WD RE2 or Raptor) and a cheap Mobo and a cheap consumer hard drive. One handles the workload better than the other due to design. That's not MS's fault. It's called progress. Linux will thrash your hard drive too, so I'm not a MS fanboi.

Vista absoloutely randomly thrashes your hard disk almost constantly for the first few weeks of installation, all you can hear is tickety tick, clickety click from the damn machine.
What is it doing? I'm not sure, auto defrag? file index? superfetch? I can't be sure, what I can be sure of is that it's *apparently* meant to run at idle priority, in reality I can clearly visibly see the performance decrease of say loading firefox or nero or any application under Vista compared to XP, while the drive thrashes about like a 'special person' thrown in the deep end of a swimming pool.

I am sadly 'oldschool' I remember running DOS 5 and 6 and I recall watching my drive light, I used to be able to spot a machine with a virus purely from the damned disk activity on the machine, because it simply isn't supposed to do anything when you're not, how that has changed over the years, it's sad, even smartdrv would stop fiddling with the drive after about 5 or 10 seconds under 6.22
Win 95, 98, virus scanners, spyware detectors, 2k, XP - it's all slowly gotten worse over the years but Vista really takes the cake, I'd love to see a laptop power consumption test of XP vs Vista on an identically spec'd machine. (tickety tick, thrashity thrash)

The short story is, I agree with the article entirely, SSD's would be worn out substantially faster under Vista than previous versions of Windows.

THIS IS BS. I bet it uses OSX ... :P

i see your priduct sucks, so you blame vista..........lol I see how it goes :p

Maybe an "Optimized for Linux" logo would solve the problem? :-o

Ahem, SSDs are not that much faster right now then their magnetic, mechanical-based brethren for non-server workloads. SSDs still cost a crapload more in GB/$$$$ ratio.

As is so often unfortunately true, CNet tends to place the pertinent information at the end of the article after deliberating misstating the topic:

Harari said this challenge alone is putting SanDisk behind schedule. "We have very good internal controller technology, as you know...That said, I'd say that we are now behind because we did not fully understand, frankly, the limitations in the Vista environment," he added.

In the very low-end of the market, however, this is not an issue. "In very low-end, ultra low-cost PCs, existing controllers can get the job done for 8-, 16-, and 32-gigabyte storage because these are relatively unsophisticated and demanding requirements," he said.

I don't know what this says to you, but what it says to me is that what it is he finds "unoptimized" about Vista is its size and its accordingly steeper resource requirements....;)

Blaming Vista for this or that seems to be a favorite tactic for a lot of people when they have to explain why certain facets of their technologies aren't up to snuff in certain ways--in this case, the fact that the Sandisk ssd's don't boast far larger storage capacities. At least it sure sounds that way to me.

Funny. Didn't Samsung's SSD units just perform very well in TR's own recent testing?

Scapegoating never goes out of style it would seem.

On top of the silly blame game it's been a year and a half since Vista launched. Even if their controllers at that time sucked in Vista that's plenty of time to fix or improve it. Maybe if they'd said this closer to Vista launched but by now...? They'd only have themselves to blame.

I'd be quite interested in seeing Mr. Gasior's recent mobile storage roundup tests done in Vista and some flavor of Linux if it's feasible.

Seriously, just lump the blame on Vista right? It's all Vista's fault that their drives are slower than the rest, right?

'It's Vista's fault that our controllers suck'...yea whatever. Sandisk has always been 'budget' although they do have some decent products but seriously this is bs.

The problem is is that Sandisk's SSDs are crap under XP as well. Other SSDs perform excellently on Vista, and it doesn't help that the specs for their drives are pretty damn sorry to begin with (its read/write speeds are half that of OCZ's Core series, which are billed as BUDGET SSDs). I'd think its safe to call bullcrap on this.

http://www.dailytech.com/SanDisk+CEO+Vista+is+Not+a+Friend+to+Our+S...

Vista isn't tweaked for anything ;).

What's that red flashing light behind me, you ask?

Why that's the BS alarm.

How does a Vista Experience index score of 5.4 (which is the same as my SATA2 Cuda) constitute bad preformance?

Vista is SSD-aware.

I guess it's not very well aware, then. Not a surprise. :(