Microsoft: Windows 7 is faster on SSDs, with two caveats

It tuned the upcoming OS to run faster on SSD drives

By Eric Lai

May 5, 2009 (Computerworld) Microsoft Corp. today gave a strong, though qualified, endorsement for running Windows 7 on PCs equipped with solid-state disk (SSD) drives, saying it has tuned the upcoming operating system to run faster on the still-emerging storage technology.

At the same time, Microsoft admitted that it has not solved two lingering problems that can cause SSDs -- mostly lower-end, older ones -- to perform sluggishly or even worse than conventional hard drives.

Out of the box, Windows 7 should install and "operate efficiently on SSDs without requiring any customer intervention," Microsoft distinguished engineer Michael Fortin wrote in a posting at the Engineering Windows 7 blog.

Users of Windows 7 -- the Release Candidate 1 became available for public download today -- will experience the full benefit of SSDs in areas where the storage technology shines.

Small chunks of data can be read about 100 times faster from an SSD than a hard drive, since an SSD doesn't require a rotating disk head to be physically repositioned, Fortin wrote. SSDs will also read large files such as videos up to twice as fast as a hard drive does, wrote Fortin. Many SSDs will also write large files more quickly than a hard drive, especially when the SSD is new or empty.

The first generation of SSDs introduced mostly in netbooks two years ago were largely a disappointment, because they were slower and pricier than expected. But performance gains, as well as falling prices, have many PC makers excited anew about SSDs. Asustek Computer Inc.'s new S121 netbook has a 512-GB SSD that will run Windows 7 when it becomes available.

However, Fortin said that Windows 7 users could experience freeze-ups while writing small files and see overall performance slow down over time, depending on the quality and age of the SSD they're using. The freezing problem is caused by the "complex arrangement" of memory cells in flash chips, he said, as well as the fact that data must be erased from cells before new data can be written to them. And unlike most hard drives, few SSDs today include RAM caches that can speed up performance.

As a result, "We see the worst of the SSDs producing very long I/O times as well, as much as one-half to one full second to complete individual random write and flush requests," Fortin wrote. "This is abysmal for many workloads and can make the entire system feel choppy, unresponsive and sluggish."

That happens despite improvements Microsoft made in Windows 7, such as resizing partitions to better fit SSDs and "reducing the frequency of writes and flushes," wrote Fortin.

Even features such as ReadyBoost, which was created by Microsoft to take advantage of USB flash drives using solid-state memory to accelerate performance of Windows Vista or 7, will actually slow down when run with most SSDs, wrote Fortin. As a result, Windows 7 will turn off ReadyBoost for SSDs.

Meanwhile, performance degradation over time is caused, again, by the need to erase data before it can be written and by the increasing fragmentation of data on SSDs as they fill up.

Some vendors, including Intel Corp., say they have mitigated the problem on their SSDs, but none claim to have solved it.

Unlike with hard drives, automatically defragmenting SSDs is not recommended because it can prematurely wear them out. Windows 7 turns off defragging by default.

Fortin said the performance degradation is not as serious as the freeze-ups. "We do not consider this to be a show-stopper," he wrote. "We don't expect users to notice the drop during normal use."

Disk compression is also not recommended for heavily-written data such as Web browser caches or e-mail files, Fortin said, because of the potential for a slowdown on SSDs, though it is fine for non-heavily-written data. However, some features, such as Windows Search and Bitlocker encryption, should work identically well or better on SSDs, Fortin said.

Computerworld's Lucas Mearian contributed to this story.

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Future shock: The Personal Computer of 2019

What's in store for everybody's go-to computer? Watch the cool video from MIT's Media Lab for one vision.

By Mary K. Pratt

March 16, 2009 (Computerworld) For those of you who want the world at your fingertips, the wait is almost over.

The future PC promises to put nearly everything you could need or want right in your palm.

Think of a souped-up version of today's smartphone, with a monitor that unrolls into a larger screen and a biometric security system that lets you access everything in your professional and personal life from anywhere, with all the data residing in the cloud. Wave it at your car to unlock the door. Order and pay for your morning coffee with a touch of a button. Plug it into a docking station and project that big presentation to your clients. Book a weekend getaway with just a few clicks.

"PCs are going from engines or tools to portals and enablers. The vision of what they'll be in the future is a partner. They'll be participating in the higher cognitive tasks of what people do to get their jobs done," says Andrew Chien, director of research at Intel Corp.

The personal computer has been a corporate workhorse for decades. And while it has evolved, becoming slimmer and more mobile, in many ways it still resembles those old terminals tethered to the mainframe. But the next decade will bring dramatic changes, as the PC evolves past the standard desktop and laptop units to amalgamations of computing devices and their peripherals.

This future PC will be smarter, too. It could discreetly remind you of the name of an acquaintance and alert you when it's time to take your medicine. It will be your colleague, your butler -- and possibly your friend.

We talked and corresponded with a dozen or so experts in R&D, IT management and academia to get a feel for what they're expecting the PC to look like a decade from now.

A New Look

One thing everyone seems to agree on: The PC of 2019 won't look like today's laptops. "I'm not seeing people carrying anything that looks like a book," says Dan Siewiorek, a professor of computer science and electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the university's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. "It would be like a phone or a ring or watch. It will probably take multiple form factors."

Siewiorek says function will increasingly influence what PCs look like. An older person who needs help with independent living, for example, might carry a PC in the form of a wristwatch and use it as a virtual coach that reminds him about appointments or medicine schedules.

A technical worker might have her PC in her eyeglasses, allowing her to access and view information through embedded monitors and share what she's seeing with colleagues and supervisors via a camera in the glasses. Siewiorek says he can even imagine how PC technology could revolutionize the way, say, offshore crane operators or airplane mechanics do their jobs.

The changing ways in which we work and live -- and the blurring line between the two -- are driving the changes we will see in our computers.

"The PC of 2019 will be nothing like the PC we know today," says Wen Xiao, CIO of global service delivery at London-based telecommunications giant BT Group PLC. "It will be smaller and ubiquitous. Its function is less of computing and more of access control and communications. The computing capabilities will reside inside the cloud and be accessed on demand by [the] individual user."

He says younger workers, and certainly those who will enter the workforce in the coming decade, expect their data -- not just their devices -- to travel with them. They need their PCs to work wherever they want them to, and they don't want to worry about storing and transferring data.

Xiao says virtualization and cloud computing are already enabling that new level of mobility, and the trend is expected to accelerate. "The computing [and] data-storage functions will all be virtualized -- device-independent, location-independent data and applications stored somewhere in the cloud, and on-demand software applications," Xiao says.

That, in turn, changes what we need from hardware. "Its main purpose is no longer computing but identification," he explains. "As a result, it will be super small or most likely combined with other devices, like mobile phone, key, bio-ID, etc. What's inside is a unique identification of the user."

Bill Schilit, a research engineer at Google Inc. and associate editor in chief of the IEEE Computer Society's Computer Magazine, says he, too, sees "the trend more and more off the desktop. We see people using just their cell phones or a very thin client on their desks or some sort of docking model, where you take your cell phone and plug it into a keyboard."

Moreover, the PCs of the future will put the accent on "personal," he says (emphasizing that this vision is his, not Google's). Consumer demand for games and instant access to everyday information -- announcements of school closings, traffic updates, weather reports -- will drive adoption, he says.

"We're going to see a lot more people using computer phones/smartphones and a lot more software for them," he says.

Shape Changers

The PCs of the future could be more flexible in every way -- even physically. For starters, they'll have adjustable screens that users can stretch, roll or unfold to open.

"So you can contort that device and make it bigger, maybe widen it to 6 inches tall and 10 inches wide so you can watch TV or access information through wireless broadband or peer-to-peer technology," says Sam Driver, an analyst at research firm ThinkBalm in Little Compton, R.I. "Then say you take that device to your office, you can stretch it and start working, and you can have it communicate in the office with printers and other devices."

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Firefox 3.1 delivery slips; developers question TraceMonkey progress

JavaScript engine bugs push release to Q2; Microsoft's IE8 may ship first

February 21, 2009 (Computerworld) Some Mozilla Corp. developers have recommended that the company consider yanking the new JavaScript engine, dubbed TraceMonkey, from Firefox 3.1 to get the Web browser back on track and out the door.

Their comments came as Mozilla's head of engineering acknowledged that the browser's final delivery date will slip.

In a message posted to a company message forum, Firefox developer David Baron wondered how long Firefox 3.1 should be held up by TraceMonkey problems. "Without TraceMonkey, we probably could have shipped 3.1 final by now, or, if not now, within the next month," he said. "I think there should be a limit to the amount we're willing to slip 3.1 to accommodate TraceMonkey, and I think we should decide what that limit is."

Graydon Hoare, a Mozilla developer who works on TraceMonkey, agreed. "I have to concur here," he said in a message on the same forum thread. "TraceMonkey is really cool tech, and a remarkably quick initial development, but it's not the whole enchilada of the browser." However, Hoare said it made more sense to disable TraceMonkey by default -- an approach used through Beta 1 -- rather than pull it from the product.

Mozilla has made much of TraceMonkey and the performance boost it gives Firefox, since it introduced the new JavaScript engine last summer. But TraceMonkey bugs, and the slow pace in patching them, were responsible for delays last month and for a three-week stretch this month when Mozilla put off scheduling the next preview, Beta 3.

The biggest bug now delaying Beta 3's release is a TraceMonkey issue.

But Mozilla will probably not pull the engine, said Mike Shaver, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, in an interview Saturday. "We're always looking at all of our choices, but I don't think it's likely," he said. "TraceMonkey is a big part of Firefox 3.1, and a big part of what we want to have for users."

Saying that Firefox 3.1 in its current form is "quite a stable product," Shaver said patience is a development virtue. "We're taking the time to get this worked out," he said. "No one will remember when Firefox 3.1 shipped other than the guy who writes the Wikipedia entry. But people will remember how Firefox 3.1 runs."

Comments by developers such as Baron and Hoare are in no way a "revolt" by programmers, said Shaver, who added that such discussions are normal at Mozilla and during software development in general. "There's always talk about what we should trade off," he said.

Mozilla conceived Firefox 3.1 as a "fast-track" update to June 2008's Firefox 3.0, but the new browser's progress has been much slower than originally planned. At one point, Mozilla was shooting for a final release as early as the last months of 2008, and the company hinted that it would use just a single beta to do so.

But Firefox 3.1 has been pushed back several times to allow Mozilla to add more features -- TraceMonkey and a private browsing mode among them -- and for additional testing. In November, for example, Mozilla slipped in a third beta to get a better handle on bugs.

"We wanted to be able to develop faster and see how that manifested on the product side," said Shaver about Firefox 3.1's pace. "Even if we get it out in Q2, we'd be looking at about a year after Firefox 3.0, and that's still faster than we've usually done."

Shaver said he has no regrets about Firefox 3.1's progress. "I'm very happy with how 3.1 is shaping up."

But it's unlikely that Firefox 3.1 will ship this quarter -- for months the broad target that Mozilla was touting. "To make it in Q1, we'd have to rush it more than we want to," Shaver said. The schedule being considered now "would put it out of Q1," he added.

In fact, Mozilla might slate a fourth beta before it moves on to a "release candidate" build. "We do betas until we're confident we're done with them," Shaver said.

Although Mozilla faces renewed pressure from Microsoft Corp., which may wrap up Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) as quickly as next month, Shaver rejected the idea that Firefox is in a race. "No, I don't think it is important," he said when asked whether Mozilla needs to get Firefox 3.1 out the door before IE8. "We're eager to get a high-quality Firefox 3.1," he said. "This is much more about having the product done right than getting it out fast."

Firefox 3.1 Beta 2, still the newest public release of the browser, debuted in early December 2008. It can be downloaded from Mozilla's site in versions for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Article By: Gregg Keizer

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