Vista to Blame for Any SSD Performance Issues: Sandisk

Solid-State drives (SSDs) have had a lot of coverage lately, mostly negative. Battery life, performance, reliability, those sorts of things have been under close scrutiny of late. Monday, in Sandisk's earnings call, Sandisk placed the blame for at least one of those issues squarely on the shoulders of everyone's favorite whipping boy: Windows Vista.

Eli Harari, Chairman and CEO of Sandisk, when asked about how his company plans to increase adoption rates of SSDs, said (emphasis mine):

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. And the next generation controllers needs to basically compensate for Vista shortfalls.

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We have very good internal controller technology, as you know. We are at this stage 100% internal controller for just about everything we make, and that’s been a 20-year tradition in here and we have a huge number of engineers that really understand the Flash issues and [inaudible] and so on. That said, I’d say that we are now behind because we did not fully understand, frankly, the limitations in the Vista environment. When we acquired M-System, M-System had very, very good industrial grade solid state disk and this is our first generation products. Unfortunately, their 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.

However, could this just be a smokescreen for poor Sandisk product performance? ? Even if Vista does play a part in this, it's interesting to note that other manufacturers seem to be able to produce drives that perform better than Sandisk's under Vista. For example, SanDisk's SSDs have sequential R/W speeds of 67 MBps and 50 MBps respectively, while OCZ’s new Core Series SSDs compare at 120 - 143 MBps and 80 - 93 MBps respectively.

And really, much of the problem with adoption rates relates to price. While it's great that Dell and Apple have lowered prices for some of their SSD options on notebooks, the premium for an SSD vs. a standard hard drive is still quite high. We won't see serious adoption take place until prices fall further, probably a lot further.