Irreverence

posted on 07 August 2008 14:51

A report quotes a Sun staffer saying Samsung is talking to Microsoft about speeding up Vista solid state drive (SSD) data transfers.

The report quotes a storage analyst supposing that this means a change in storage packet size. Vista, and other O/S', write and read data to/from hard drives with a 512byte sector size. In a spectacular example of foot-shooting - a hindsight judgement luxury - flash solid state drives use sectors eight times as big; 4KB.

If Vista could use the larger sectors then the number of HDD I/O accesses would drop in a single I/O operation where more than 512 bytes of data was involved, and this would then make Vista more responsive when dealing with SSD storage.

It would require Vista to know that it was carrying out I/O to a solid state drive and not a hard drive and then to change the characteristics of its I/O operations. This suggests pretty fundamental code changes and additions to Vista, if Microsoft decides to do it.

Altering Vista would take time and a lot of testing to implement. Vista SP3 perhaps?

Note.

The report also included an SSD capacity increase schedule for Samsung which goes like this:-

- 128GB -Q3, 2008

- 256GB - end 2008

- 512GB - by 2010

- 1TB - (implied) by 2011.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}