twitter's Journal: Vista Disk Thrashing.

Recently, San Disk delayed SSDs because Vista could not use them. As Chairman and [CEO] Eli Harari said, "we are now behind because we did not fully understand, frankly, the limitations in the Vista environment." Others have complained of those problems before. Here are a couple of earlier warnings:

• September 21, 2007 - "Vista heats-up hard disks more than XP does. Hard disks in idle mode have a five to seven degree Celsius higher temperature and hard disks in operation are seven to nine degrees warmer than under XP. The hard disk's temperature can get ten degrees higher than the vendors' specifications allow. This could cause hard disk failures eight times more frequent than with XP."
• November 14, 2007 - " In Vista, your hard drive thinks it's a bewitched lawnmower - it's always active. Even after all startup programs are loaded, the HD is still active: Vista's Constant HD Activity Craziness." The user then lists a list of programs that causes this and makes the absurd claim that performance is not harmed. He omits DRM and laughs at people who think M$ will do the things allowed by the Windows EULA.

No wear leveling algorithm can fix this kind of aggressive hard drive access, it will wear out SSDs.

Update, 1/24/2009. The Wintel press has done as well as they can to spin this problem in M$'s favor:

• July 28, 2008 - They phrase the problem as " Vista isn't optimized for solid state disks - and the current generation of solid state disks aren't optimized for Vista." That is a nice way of saying that useless features of Vista, which you can't turn off, thrash your disk. Blaming vendors for the problem is typical M$ behavior.
• July 23, 2008 - GNU/Linux is smeared as inferior. Richard Heyes, who heads up SanDisk's SSD Business Unit, was misquoted describing Vista as "Full featured" and GNU/Linux as "simple." I can't believe someone with any technical background would mistake GNU/Linux's special adaptations, such as filesystems designed for flash memory and ram disk loading or write intensive partitions, as simple in any way other than simple to use with flash. Surely vendors don't think GNU/Linux lacks programs or features.

Shame on the Wintel press for not getting this right. Between Vista's infamous file indexing for "quick search" and DRM complications, Vista will never be able to work with SSDs that wear and it will work poorly normal media as documented above.