While I’m never the first to jump on Vista for this or that problem (I’m guessing it’ll be a great OS in a couple years), this is pretty dumb. Larger capacity solid state disks are in the works and, being more complicated internally, will require a more sophisticated controller. You don’t think about your hard drive controller that much, and that’s probably because hard drive technology has been in the same generation for practically 20 years. And you expect a company like Microsoft to future-proof their OS so that the next wave of technology will work best on Windows — what a selling point it would be if SSDs just worked better on Vista, right?

But Vista isn’t a forward-thinking OS, it’s a retrospective OS, the last and largest in a line of dinosaurs. And Sandisk says Vista isn’t ready for the next generation of SSDs. They’re gonna get zapped on this.

Samsung’s just announced that its 128GB solid state drive “is now in volume production.” We’ll likely see them available in the coming months, but it’ll be really interesting to see what they’ll be priced at. In case you hadn’t noticed, SSDs aren’t exactly affordable in any substantial quantity yet.

The 128GB of storage, though, finally puts these drives at respectable capacities – although I’d argue that a 64GB SSD would probably suit most people just fine, too. This new drive from Samsung features a 3 gigabit-per-second interface and is rated at 90MB/s read speed, 70MB/s write speed.

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You may remember a story a little while back suggesting that SSDS did not in fact save battery power. Well, that really pulled the tail of the great cat “The Internet,” resulting in heavy criticism of the testers’ methods. People feel that the higher-end SSDs may have been using more power, but the tests ignored that their higher capacities meant they would do more work under that testing situation. The masses clamored for a “real-world” test.

So Laptopmag more or less provided one. They set up a laptop to load webpages every 30 seconds (no caching) and had it do that until it died with three different hard drives — two SSD, one 5400RPM HDD. The SSDs died 10 minutes later than the HDD: not a major gain, but not a loss, as Tom’s Hardware’s report would have you believe. I’d have liked to see some movie or music playing as well to exercise the things a little bit, but I’m sure that’s forthcoming in the torrent of clarifying tests every site in the world will be running in response to this little dispute.

Tom’s Hardware’s findings that SSD drives don’t actually save you any power is pretty surprising to me, especially following the experiment last week comparing an HDD Eee to a high-performance SSD Eee. Logic and reason seem to indicate that a passive drive solution with no moving parts would almost certainly have not just minor savings power-wise but possibly orders of magnitude.

Unfortunately, that seems not to be the case. The tests they’ve run are pretty reliable. Apparently there is still a lot of optimization to be done to reduce idle power consumption; years of work on HDDs have made them as efficient as they’re going to get, while energy saving techniques for SSDs are still in their infancy. Furthermore, many of the drives offered little in the way of performance increases. I think the takeaway message here is not that SSDs suck or anything, more that there’s still a lot to do to make them better, and that they’re not a panacea for your performance and battery life worries.

I recently got the chance to test out a few solid state drives sent to me by Texas-based DV Nation.

I tried a super fast MemoRight GT 32GB 2.5-inch SSD, and two 32GB Mtron SSDs, one 3.5-inch and one 2.5-inch. I also tested a standard desktop and a standard laptop hard drive to see how they stacked up.

Here’s what I found.

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