The biggest knock against SSDs, even with the new "affordable" models hitting the scene, is the price. But now comes word that recent, underwhelming reports regarding performance and power savings are due to none other than Windows Vista.

Now, we know that as an OS, it's a bit (how do I put this nicely...) bloated, but is it fair to lay the blame on it? According to SanDisk's CEO, yes.

Speaking during SanDisk's second-quarter earnings conference call, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Eli Harari said that Windows Vista will present a special challenge for solid-state drive makers. "As soon as you get into Vista applications in notebook and desktop, you start running into very demanding applications because Vista is not optimized for flash memory solid-state disk," he said.

This is due to Vista's design. "The next generation controllers need to basically compensate for Vista shortfalls," he said.

That's interesting to hear because Samsung makes no such claims and its MLC drives -- the same tech SanDisk hopes will repeal the Vista performance tax -- are already in production. Plus, didn't Microsoft learn a thing or two about dealing with flash memory with ReadyBoost?

Either way, no need to fret. Over at Datamation David Storm has a pretty good overview of how things stand now if you're considering outfitting that new laptop with SSD. There's also a cool mention of SSDs in the datacenter, but I shudder to think how much those arrays cost.

[via Engadget - Good luck, Ryan!]