Samsung is one of the biggest semiconductor manufacturers on the planet and it has been spearheading the development of Solid State Drives. Even if a lot of the performance comes from the actual hardware, that’s not all. Proper support and optimizations in the operating systems is also important, something Samsung has adapted by cooperating with Microsoft for improving the performance of SSD devices in Windows.
Windows was designed to work best with mechanical harddrives and even if the basic principle is the same for Solid State Drives, there are some obvious differences for how they fetch and store data, which could be optimized through different data package sizes.
“There is a mismatch in the way Windows Vista handles data sizes on hard drives and SSDs, Wong said. Vista has been optimized to handle hard drive data in smaller chunks. In contrast, the sector size — also known as page size — of a SSD is larger than the sector size of a hard drive. That results in inefficient SSD performance when it’s slotted into a disk drive bay, Wong said.”
The article over at Computerworld, analyst Gregory Wong also points out that the storage capacity of SSD devices double every 12 months, which means that within the near future we will see the first 512GB retail SSDs.
