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What’s the best OS for SSDs? Windows 2000
12/11/2008 at 11:52 AM by Brad Linder 

Microsoft says that Windows 7 will be designed to run faster on solid state disks than Windows XP or Vista. But the folks at flash memory maker Patriot Media say there’s already an OS that outperforms them both. And no, it’s not some version of Linux or OS X. It’s Windows 2000.

Apparently Windows 2000 runs 5% to 8% faster on solid state disks than the newer operating systems because there are fewer applications running in the background on the older OS. Apparently Windows 98 is even faster, but it also tends to wear out flash memory more quickly because it has a habit of writing over the same portion of the SSD over and over instead of spreading the data out across the memory module.

Many netbooks, including Asus Eee PC, Dell Inspiron Mini 9, and HP Mini 1000 models ship with solid state disks. But none that I’m aware of come with Windows 2000 as an option. Still, if you’re looking for a bit of a performance boost and happen to have an old install disk, now might be a good time to pull it out of the closet. On the other hand, may newer programs won’t run on Windows 2000 and good luck finding all the security updates you need.

According to Patrio Media’s tests, Windows Vista performs better with SSDs than Windows XP; OS X trumps Vista, and Linux is faster than either but still slower than Windows 2000.

http://liliputing.com/2008/12/whats-the-best-os-for-ssds-windows-2000.html



Which operating system is best for solid-state drives?
Most modern-day operating systems play well with the new storage technology

By Lucas Mearian, December 11, 2008 12:00 PM

Computerworld - Solid-state disk (SSD) drive architecture can play a big role in how fast a computer boots up and performs. But how big a role the SSDs play -- and how much faster an operating system is -- depends as much on the operating system as on the drive. Although none of the mainstream operating systems now in use have been optimized to work better with SSDs, some do natively work more efficiently than others, according to storage experts.

Of the recent operating systems that have been tested, would you believe the winner so far is ... Windows 2000?

That aging operating system, said Saeed Arash Far, engineering manager at SSD manufacturer Patriot Memory, is markedly faster than Windows XP, Vista, Mac OS X or Linux when using NAND flash memory. Far said his company's tests showed that Windows 2000 is 5% to 8% faster over its newer rivals because "Windows 2000 doesn't run any applications in the background.

"We're getting ridiculous numbers with Windows 2000," he said. "When it comes to Vista, it is faster than XP, but with XP, you have the luxury of turning off background applications. ... With Vista, you can't."

According to Far, Mac OS X runs "a little faster than Vista" with an SSD drive, but Linux is "always faster" than Vista or Mac OS X -- to the tune of 1% to 2% -- because like Windows 2000, "it never runs anything in the background."

"If you really want to go inside [the OS numbers], Windows 98 was the fastest of all," Far said. But there's a downside: Windows 98 does not support wear-leveling technology, which evenly distributes data writes to NAND flash memory to ensure no single area of an SSD wears out faster than another. Far said his company's SSDs would wear out in only about a year when running Windows 98.

That brings users who may be wondering about the advantages of SSDs back to the Big Three operating systems: Windows Vista and XP and Mac OS X. The claims and counterclaims about SSD technology and operating systems highlight the intricacies of marrying operating systems designed for hard disk drives with the newer technology of SSDs.

Vista slowing SSD adoption?
In July, SanDisk Corp. CEO Eli Harari said during an earnings call that Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Vista worked so poorly with SSDs and, as a result, was actually slowing the adoption of NAND technology. Harari blamed some "very demanding applications" that, in turn, require more sophisticated SSD controller technology to manage how data is transferred to the drive.

But Harari's claim is one that other disk vendors, including rival Micron Technology Inc., have rebutted.

Using an SSD with a SATA interface, Micron has performed tests on Vista; its predecessor, Windows XP; and Mac OS X, capturing data about the newer drives while booting up the operating systems, installing files, running Office productivity applications and shutting down the computer. Micron found that Vista and Mac OS X performed better with its SSDs than XP, according to a post on Micron's blog site. XP does not align the data in the most efficient way for an SSD -- in 4KB blocks -- while Vista and Mac OS X do, according to Justin Sykes, director of marketing for SSD products at Micron. (Linux, which wasn't tested, also aligns data in 4K blocks.)

"NAND [flash memory] fundamentally has native 4K block sizes. Anything that's not aligned to a 4K block creates extra challenges," Sykes said. "There ends up being background operations to garbage-collect that empty space [in larger file blocks] that isn't fully utilized. And, so that activity is chewing up your bandwidth in the background, and it adds extra wear to the NAND [flash memory]."

According to Dean A. Klein, vice president of memory system development at Micron, Apple's platform seems to perform better with SSDs than Windows systems. "It boots better," he said. "Mac OS does things differently."

When Windows-based PCs boot, the BIOS does "quite a few things" while it's waiting for what would normally be a hard disk drive to spin up, Klein said. "With a MacBook, one thing you'll notice is that it boots up very quick. Our belief is that it's savvy enough to know it has an SSD in it, and it's not waiting for the SSD to spin up, and so takes some shortcuts."

Far agreed that Mac OS X is about 1% faster than Vista. But that's not the case when using virtualization applications such as Parallels and VMware's Fusion in Mac OS X 10.5 to run the rival operating system. When running Vista through virtualization at the same time the Mac OS is running, SSD performance is affected.

4KB blocks of data are more efficient
Micron's tests showed that when XP begins writing application-related data, that data is almost never aligned with the beginning of a new NAND page; it begins partway into the page and ends partially through another. "So the controller has to deal with that and come back and clean it up later," Far said. "Vista will start that write on 0 or at 8, for example. So the data structure in Vista is more aligned to 4K blocks."

In NAND flash memory, blocks consists of a number of pages and each page is either 512, 2,048 or 4,096 bytes in size. Therefore, a 4KB block more efficiently fills the memory.

Troy Winslow, marketing manager for the NAND Products Group at Intel Corp., said, "We've even done studies showing 80% of all OS requests are in the 4K-to-16K range, yet many SSDs were designed on older controller technology that was requesting large file-size transactions of 128K in size. All SSDs perform best at the smaller file size."

Winslow said benchmark testing on XP and Vista indicated that the less-efficient XP machines show a 10% improvement in random input/output operations per second using an SSD instead of a hard drive, while Vista showed a 25% improvement under the same conditions.

Pat Wilkison, vice president of marketing and business development at NAND flash memory manufacturer STEC Inc., believes there's no detectable difference in SSDs performance among varying operating systems. "There just has not been any meaningful work done in optimizing for SSD," he said.

Debating defragging
However, one difference between Vista and XP is that Vista, by default, enables background drive defragmentation -- something that isn't necessary with an SSD and can actually wear out the drive more rapidly. While most laptop and PC resellers disable background defragmentation on Vista systems that ship with an SSD, anyone installing or upgrading to Vista may not know they should do that to preserve SSD life, Klein said.

To turn off Vista's auto defragmentation feature, a user would go to the Start menu, then the Control Panel and then choose Control Panel Home. Next select "System and Maintenance" and under the Administrative Tools section, choose "Defragment your hard drive." Vista then allows a user to check or uncheck the Run automatically function.

According to Howard Butler, vice president of technical support at Diskeeper Corp., hard disk drives and SSDs both benefit from defragmentation utilities in operating at peak efficiency. Data may be laid down in contiguous clusters on an SSD, just as with hard disk drives; as it's deleted, space is freed up. But those pockets of free space may be left unused. Defragmentation helps by consolidating data and free space, Butler said.

Joseph Unsworth, an analyst at Gartner Inc., said Vista's SuperFetch feature gives Vista a boost over XP with regard to SSDs because it can preload often-used applications into system memory so they're ready when needed. Vista introduced the concept of low-priority I/O, which enables background processes to run with lower-priority access to the hard drive than other programs.

Unsworth installed Intel's X25 SSD on a PC running Vista and said he was impressed with the boot-up times over the hard disk drive he replaced. While there are now more than 90 SSD vendors, Unsworth said he prefers drives from Intel, Samsung and STEC, which he said offer advanced architectures with multiple channels to NAND flash chips set up in a parallel. For example, Intel has 10 channels on its X25-M SSD. In multichannel NAND architecuters, each parallel channel represents multiple streams of data to multiple NAND chips, yielding greater sustained throughput -- and speed.

When will operating systems be optimized?
Even if operating systems aren't yet optimized for SSDs, they likely will be as the technology gains ground. Last month, at its Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in Los Angeles, Microsoft promised that its upcoming Windows 7 would work better with SSDs.

Unlike Vista, Windows 7 will turn off disk defragmentation when it detects an SSD instead of a spinning disk drive. Windows 7 will also delete "garbage" data in advance. That would head off garbage collection, which can add latency -- a major factor in the slower write speeds often seen in SSDs.

Microsoft also plans a certification program for SSDs so that the drives properly identify themselves to Windows 7 and prioritize data I/O for the SATA interface.

Regardless of what Microsoft does, Unsworth said he believes that Apple will have the advantage because its OS is closed, meaning Apple can drive its own development initiatives and will likely do so when it comes to SSD optimization.

Apple also plans to launch Mac OS X 10.6, a.k.a. "Snow Leopard," which is expected to trim overhead and optimize it for faster I/O.

"I have to believe they will, and I've told them and recommended to them, wouldn't it be awfully compelling to get boot up with an SSD in under 10 seconds?" Unsworth said. "How easy would that be to convey as a selling point to the consumer?"

Read more about Data Storage in Computerworld's Data Storage Topic Center.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9123140/Which_operating_system_is_best_for_solid_state_drives_?pageNumber=1


Boosting SSD Performance With The Right OS
By Bestofmedia Team, David MurphyDECEMBER 19, 2008 9:20 AM

There’s no question that solid-state drives are the talk of the storage town. We’ve seen them enter into the laptop marketplace with a growing vengeance.  And even the prices of the bare, plopped-into-your-drive-bays products are reaching tolerable levels. Excellent speeds at optimal pricing – what’s not to like about SSDs?

We should have put an asterisk next to the word “speeds,” because not all SSDs are the same. Nor do they interact in the same way regardless of what operating system you use.  According to a recent Computerworld article, a Patriot Memory research project found that SSD performance was best in—you’ll never believe it—Windows 2000.  Following that, Windows Vista came in second place at five to eight percent slower and Windows XP trailed a distant third.

So why is this the case?  There are few reasons for the dramatic differences.  Saeed Arash Far, an engineering manager at Patriot Memory, suggests that the removal of background applications in Windows 2000 catapults it into the performance lead.  But in that case, one would expect to see a difference regardless of what hard drive is used in the testing – a lack of running tasks is an operating system issue, not an SSD benefit.

According to SSD manufacturer Micron, comprehensive performance testing between the Vista and XP operating systems revealed that XP doesn’t block the data for maximum SSD performance.  Whereas XP will partially fill 4KB NAND pages seemingly at a whim, Vista attempts to reduce partially filled pages in a block as much as possible.  This reduces storage inefficiencies and, according to Micron, translates into tangible performance benefits between the two operating systems.

"NAND [flash memory] fundamentally has native 4K block sizes. Anything that's not aligned to a 4K block creates extra challenges," said Justin Sykes, Micron’s Director of Marketing for SSD products, as quoted in the article. "There ends up being background operations to garbage-collect that empty space [in larger file blocks] that isn't fully utilized. And, so that activity is chewing up your bandwidth in the background, and it adds extra wear to the NAND [flash memory]."

SSD performance isn’t just tied to the software running on it. The two prevailing SSD technologies, single-level cell and multi-level cell, each offer different speed benefits. A majority of MLC drives offer poorer performance on their read and write speeds than SLC drives. And even the best of the MLC drives can look impressive on their reads, but still have yet to offer comparable write performance to an SLC drive.  But there’s a reason MLC-based SSDs exist: they’re cheaper than SLCs by hundreds of dollars.

There are also interface issues with modern SSDs, but we’re starting to see a gradual phasing out of SSDs that run on SATA bridges to internal PATA interfaces.  The problem being that a PATA-based SSD could conceivably fill its interface’s performance pipe.  It’s the same reason why eSATA is a better connection choice, speed-wise, than USB: the latter simply can’t handle as much bandwidth as the former.

Where does that leave SSD consumers?  Apparently in the hands of Windows Vista as an operating system, provided the performance metrics are correct—unless you really miss the glory days of Windows 2000.  But as for the specific type of SSD that provides the fastest performance, that’s more a question for benchmarks to answer.  Modern manufacturers aren’t always up to list the exact specifications of the product being purchased.  You might not know you’re getting an MLC or SLC product until you test the performance yourself!

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ssd-hdd-sata,6719.html



 
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