SanDisk slams Vista's solid-state disk performance

 

Gallery

By Barry Collins

Posted on 22 Jul 2008 at 14:01

SanDisk has blamed Windows Vista for the poor performance of its solid-state drives.

Speaking during the company's second-quarter earnings conference call, chairman and chief executive officer, Eli Harari, said Vista wasn't exploiting the full potential of flash drives.

"As soon as you get into Vista applications in notebook and desktop, you start running into very demanding applications because Vista is not optimised for flash-memory solid-state disk," he claimed. "The next generation controllers need to basically compensate for Vista shortfalls."

Harari said it could take another six months or more for SanDisk to iron out the Vista kinks. "Unfortunately, [SSD] performance in the Vista environment falls short of what the market really needs and that is why we need to develop the next generation, which we'll start sampling end of this year, early next year," he said.

"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."

SanDisk's comments mirror PC Pro's own benchmark tests, which show that solid-state drives lag behind mechanical hard disks in real-world performance, albeit with faster boot times.