SanDisk said on Monday that Windows Vista is not optimized for flash drives – delaying delivery of optimized drives until next year.
Specifically the CEO said at a second quarter earnings conference “As soon as you get into Vista applications in notebook and desktop, you start running into very demanding applications because Vista is not optimized for flash memory solid-state disk,”
Hmm. I would have to agree totally. I think almost every one of my Vista machines is constantly accessing the hard drive. This is is a big problem when switching to solid state devices, since you want to minimize the number of writes to the hardware – otherwise their failure rate will increase significantly.
This might explain Microsoft’s statement earlier this year that Windows XP will still be shipped on ultra-portable OEM machines – the same hardware that would use flash for hard drives.
Frankly, I think it will be quite some time before Vista is ready for flash drive applications. It simply requires too much time with the hard drive. Working around this, or having Microsoft make changes is going to prove extremely difficult.
Maybe they will have it ready by the time they release Windows 7.