Not everyone is happy about performance of solid state drives (SSDs) under existing Windows XP or Windows Vista operating systems (OS) by Microsoft Corp., but that is going to change once the next-generation OS Windows 7 hits the market, at least according to developers and analysts..

At the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) held later this week, Microsoft will provide a briefing titled “Windows 7 Enhancements for Solid-State Drives”. According to Microsoft, PC systems that have solid-state drives “are shipping in increasing volumes”, which requires “Windows enhancements that take advantage of the latest updates to standardized command sets, such as ATA”, reports Cnet News.com web-site.

“It is pretty widely held that SSDs are unlikely to meet with much acceptance until Windows undergoes significant tuning to take advantage of all the speed that SSDs have to offer,” said Jim Handy, an analyst at Objective Analysis.

Reportedly, Microsoft will also talk about file system optimizations as well as think about the future of SSDs and their role in Windows.

“Windows 7 will be able to identify a SSD uniquely. Certain ATA commands will improve the speed that solid state drives write to disk,” according to Gregory Wong of Forward Insights.

In addition, Microsoft plans to address the concerns regarding the lifetime of inexpensive solid state drives that are used in netbooks during its sessions entitles “Designing Flash-Based Netbooks for Windows 7”, where it will cover the ways to develop flash-based netbooks using Windows 7.

“We will explain how to calculate the lifetime of a flash-based netbook based on specific workload numbers,” a statement by Leon Braginski, a senior lead program manager in Microsoft's PC3 team, reads.

Tags: Microsoft, Windows, SSD