14 DAY TRIAL // Windows Vista plays extremely well with hybrid storage drives, Microsoft claimed in defense of itself and the latest Windows operating system. The Redmond company found itself under a barrage of fire from the HDD (hard disk drive) and SSD (solid state drive) makers at a recent event with the IDEMA (International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association) DiskCon conference. Microsoft was accused of not offering sufficient backing to the integration of hybrid hard drives with Windows Vista. The company rebutted the accusation brought against it at DiskCon, adding that Vista already contains drivers optimized for hybrid storage, and that there is little that can be done to improve them.
Hybrid hard drives are essentially a combination of two technologies, nonvolatile, solid state flash memory on one side and traditional disk drives on the other. The Flash memory acts as supplemental data cache delivering superior performance, increased battery life and efficient power consumption. Additionally, because the operating system and the applications on top of it are addressing nonvolatile memory instead of the actual hard drive, response times are improved offering superior speed. Microsoft critics indicated that the Redmond company is far from being 100% committed to the support of hybrid hard drives, although the technology is created for Windows Vista.
"Microsoft certainly does provide drivers for hybrid hard drives in Vista," stated Matt Ayers, Program Manager in the Microsoft Windows Client Performance group, as cited by eWEEK. "They've been in there all along, and they work with any hard drive. I don't quite understand the issue here. And about 'optimized' drivers-we never send out any drivers that aren't optimized." Still, with Windows Vista at just 6% of the operating system market, and with hybrid storage drives plagued by delays, it's unlikely for hardware items to become a de facto standard any time soon.
Windows Vista brings to the table ReadyBoost and ReadyDrive, features designed to take full advantage of Flash memory in order to increase performance. Still, the combination between Vista and hybrid hard drives was criticized for not delivering sufficient gains in performance margins over traditional system configurations to justify the extra cost.