Intel Product Manager Talks SSDs

Sandisk came out a few months ago and said that operating system makers are not taking full advantage of SSDs. Do you agree and is there anything Microsft and Apple can do to tweak their OSes? I think from a perspective of OSes in general taking advantage of SSD, there’s a lot to be done in that space. We are working with Microsoft. On the other hand, our SSDs are agnostic from an OS standpoint because they deliver the performance required to meet the SATA bus saturation. So, yes there are things the OSes can do, but I don’t think it’s that broken today, because if you have a slow SSD, then OS optimizations will help a lot more, but if you have a fast SSD it’s going to mask, because from a hardware standpoint it’s saturating the bus. In the long term, yes we do believe. You know one of the questions is “do you need to defrag your SSD?” Various things like that [turning off auto defrag] will be performed by OS vendors. We’ve noticed that boot time is not increased by much, if at all, over mechanical drives when using an SSD. Is there something the OS makers are not doing to improve the boot time for SSDs? We started looking into this too and asking what really happens when you boot. Two things happen. XP is different than Vista but, in general, when you boot up your PC, you see your first screen come up and I think the OS delivers that first screen pretty fast, but if you look at your hard drive light, your hard drive keeps spinning and spinning and spinning so, while your first screen may come up, you may not be up and running to be productive. So when we talk about boot time, you need to look at boot to productivity or coming out of hibernate to productivity. How soon can you log on and check your e-mail? How soon can you open that PDF file or your large Excel spreadsheet? So there’s a boot process where your OS boots up to the first screen and then there’s a secondary productivity phase and so, when we measure boot, we look from boot to productive , when a user can  be productive, which we believe is more a benchmark of what a normal user would want to do. When the first screen comes up, that’s relatively fast. I think where the SSD gets the benefit is when you’re trying to do a lot of transfers and read a lot of data to come out and be productive. Any future plans you can talk about? In Q4 of this year, we’ll be sampling and getting into production on a 160GB MLC drive. That’s the mainstream drive. Then on the Extreme, we’ll increase from 32GB to 64GB. In 2009. when we come out with the first iteration of our 34nm product, we’re obviously able to increase the density much higher than the 160GB. And these are all on the 3GBps SATA and obviously in 2010, when SATA 3 comes in at 6Gbps, we’re obviously looking at products which will even saturate that bus. So, higher capacities, better performance,  including some other value props we have in terms of making the system better.