- Back to homepage

Engineering Windows 7: Support and Q&A for Solid-State Drives

@ 2009/05/08

There’s a lot of excitement around the potential for the widespread adoption of solid-state drives (SSD) for primary storage, particularly on laptops and also among many folks in the server world. As with any new technology, as it is introduced we often need to revisit the assumptions baked into the overall system (OS, device support, applications) as a result of the performance characteristics of the technologies in use. This post looks at the way we have tuned Windows 7 to the current generation of SSDs. This is a rapidly moving area and we expect that there will continue to be ways we will tune Windows and we also expect the technology to continue to evolve, perhaps introducing new tradeoffs or challenging other underlying assumptions. Michael Fortin authored this post with help from many folks across the storage and fundamentals teams.

Comment from Rutar @ 2009/05/08

It seems to be Bizarro MS.

Comment from jmke @ 2009/05/08

Microsoft refers to Anandtech's website... kudos

also TRIM info:

Quote:

In addition to the above, Microsoft and SSD manufacturers are adopting the Trim operation. In Windows 7, if an SSD reports it supports the Trim attribute of the ATA protocol’s Data Set Management command, the NTFS file system will request the ATA driver to issue the new operation to the device when files are deleted and it is safe to erase the SSD pages backing the files. With this information, an SSD can plan to erase the relevant blocks opportunistically (and lazily) in the hope that subsequent writes will not require a blocking erase operation since erased pages are available for reuse.

All information and graphics contained in Madshrimps are sole property of the Madshrimps crew and may not be reproduced or copied in any manner without written permission from us.