Microsoft: Windows 7 optimized to run faster on SSDs

Microsoft has made "many changes" in order to make Windows 7 run faster on solid-state drives (SSD), the emerging gold standard in data storage. In a post on Microsoft's Engineering Windows 7 blog, Microsoft distinguished engineer Michael Fortin wrote that out of the box, Windows 7 should "operate efficiently on SSDs without requiring any customer intervention."

Interestingly, technologies such as Superfetch and ReadyBoost--which are all designed to improve the performance of the Windows operating system on traditional hard drives--will actually be disabled on a SSD. This is owing to SSD's superior random and sequential read performance, which might actually be slowed down as a result. Also disabled are any boot and application launch prefetching on SSDs that show good performance in the areas of random read, random write and flush.

One thing is for certain: Microsoft is making a huge effort to make sure Windows 7 performs better on SSDs, even noting that,"... the future of SSDs in mobile and desktop PCs (as well as enterprise servers) looks very bright to us."

For more on this story:
- check out this blog at Engineering Windows 7
- check out this article at Computerworld

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