Samsung isn’t just pushing the envelope in storage capacity of SSDs (solid-state drives), it is also working with software makers to boost SSD performance on operating systems. The company on Wednesday said it was in talks with Microsoft to improve the performance of SSDs on the Windows OS.

The speed and way in which SSDs fetch and cache data are different than hard drives, said Michael Wang, flash marketing manager at Sun. Samsung hopes to work with Microsoft to boost SSD performance on Windows by discovering optimal packet sizes for data transfers and the best ways to read and write files, for example.

“We have been so used to hard drives for so many years, Windows is optimized for that obviously,” Wang said.

Windows is designed to fetch and cache data using rotating media, but by working with Microsoft, Samsung wants to distinguish SSDs from hard drives on the Windows OS, Wang said.

Wang declined to provide further information on the discussions with Microsoft.

It is generally thought that SSDs could replace hard drives, but both differ in data sizes and how Windows should treat both, said Gregory Wong, an analyst with Forward Insights.

There is a mismatch in the way Windows Vista handles data sizes on hard drive 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 SSDs are larger than hard drive sector sizes. That results in inefficient SSD performance when slotted into a disk drive bay, Wong said.

“My guess is that [Samsung and Microsoft] are maybe working on the OS recognizing an SSD with a 4K-byte sector size instead of a hard disk drive with a 512-byte sector size,” Wong said.

Sun is already working with Samsung to bulk up SSD support on the ZFS (Zettabyte File System), which is included in the Solaris OS, and will also be supported in Apple’s upcoming Mac OS X 10.6, codenamed Snow Leopard. Sun is adding capabilities to boost the durability and performance of SSDs on ZFS-based operating systems. For example, Sun may add defragmentation capabilities for SSDs, which organizes data in a particular order to enable quicker data access.

SSDs were not considered ideal for defragmentation because of limited read-and-write capabilities, Wong said. However, Samsung and Sun in July jointly announced an 8G-byte SSD that bumped up durability from 100,000 read-and-write cycles to 500,000. That brings defragmentation in SSDs closer to reality, which could improve its caching and provide quicker access to data. Sun plans to put SSDs into storage products later this year.

Samsung will release 128G-byte SSDs in the third quarter, and by the end of the year it will put 256G-byte SSDs into production, Wang said. The density of SSDs are doubling every 12 months, Wang said. That means a 512G-byte SSD could be coming soon, although Wang neither confirmed nor denied it.

“It is a matter of cost, demand and requirement,” Wang said.

Samsung is also working to reduce power consumption and developing controller algorithms to boost the longevity of SSDs, Wang said.

Despite the continuous improvements, price-per-gigabyte could continue to be an issue when comparing SSDs to hard drives, Forward Insight’s Wong said.

“The cost per gigabyte of a 2.5-inch SSD is something like five times that of a hard disk drive,” Wong said. The price difference mainly applies to the consumer space, where PC makers like Apple, Dell and HP offer SSDs in laptops.

Samsung’s Wang said the company is working with PC makers to develop SSD form factors that could fit into different laptop models.

In the server space, customers may bypass price for performance, said Michael Cornwell, lead technologist for flash memory at Sun in a recent interview. Server-grade SSDs usually perform better in certain environments like Web 2.0, where they are comparatively faster and more power efficient than hard drives.

Web 2.0 applications could drive the adoption of SSDs in the enterprise, Cornwell said. Delivery of distributed Web 2.0 applications — like cached photo content — may be delivered quicker from SSD nodes than hard drives, Cornwell said.

Many server vendors have announced plans to include server-grade SSDs in systems, including Hewlett-Packard. Samsung is working with PC makers and server vendors on the implementation of SSDs, Wang said.

“Most of these data centers, when they employ a new technology, it takes a long time to … qualify and evaluate,” Wang said.

Source: pcworld