SanDisk, a popular maker of hard drives, flash drives and other storage solutions is having problems making solid State Drives (SSD’s) work for Windows Vista powered computers.
SanDisk is a proven manufacturer of storage solutions. They are one of the competitive brands in the storage solutions market and have been making hard drives, flash drives and solid state drives for desktops, laptops, cameras, mobile telephones, UMPC’s etc.
In fact, SanDisk supplies PC manufacturers with hard drives and it is possible that the more popular brands like Dell, HP, Apple or Toshiba have contracts with SanDisk to supply their high-end and next generation laptops with Solid State Drives. SSD’s are becoming the choice storage solution for portable gadgets. MacBook Airs, iPods and iPhones all use SSD’s. UMPC’s are also using SSD’s due to the more compact size of the drive and large capacity.
Needless to say, it came as a blow to Microsoft when SanDisk announced that SSD’s are not a great partner for the software maker’s current flagship OS, Windows Vista.
SanDisk Chairman and CEO Eli Harari said at a conference call while reporting the company’s second quarter earnings, that Windows Vista presents a special (and difficult) challenge to SSD manufacturers, "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."
The CEO also pointed out that they aren’t having a problem building the SSD’s for many of the popular and cheap gadgets on the market, "In very low-end, ultra low-cost PCs, existing controllers can get the job done for 8-, 16-, and 32-gigabyte storage because these are relatively unsophisticated and demanding requirements."
Harari continued, "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."
It may not be Microsoft’s concern at the moment, but if the next generation of computers will be using SSD’s, Microsoft needs to improve on Vista’s requirements so they’ll be able to run the OS on tomorrow’s computers.
