Samsung and Microsoft in talks to speed up SSDs on Vista

[Dalo Harkin]

A couple of weeks ago SanDisk criticised Windows Vista for not being optimized for solid state drives. Now Samsung seems to be confirming such claims, but it is also hoping to work with Microsoft in order to overcome these limitations.

 

Windows, logically enough, has always been optimized to work with traditional hard drives. But the speed and way in which SSDs fetch and cache data are significantly different than that of rotating media, with SSDs having fewer but larger sector sizes that are unrecognizable to the OS – which results in inefficient SSD performance when slotted into a disk drive bay.

 

Samsung didn’t reveal specific details, but some speculate there could be a fairly significant change in the way Vista works with storage hardware so that it can recognize an SSD with a 4K-byte sector size instead of just a hard disk drive with a 512-byte sector size. It will be interesting to see how any major revamps to Vista in this regard will affect SSD adoption in the consumer market – if at all.