Patriot Memory did test which Operating System performs best on Solid State Disks. The outcome is quite surprising!
According to Saeed Arash Far, engineering manager at SSD manufacturer Patriot Memory, Windows 2000 is markedly faster than Windows XP, Vista, Mac OS X or Linux when using NAND flash memory. Far said his company's tests showed that Windows 2000 is 5% to 8% faster over its newer rivals because "Windows 2000 doesn't run any applications in the background.", Computerworld reports.
"We're getting ridiculous numbers with Windows 2000," he said. "When it comes to Vista, it is faster than XP, but with XP, you have the luxury of turning off background applications. ... With Vista, you can't."
According to Far, Mac OS X runs "a little faster than Vista" with an SSD drive, but Linux is "always faster" than Vista or Mac OS X -- to the tune of 1% to 2% -- because like Windows 2000, "it never runs anything in the background."
"If you really want to go inside [the OS numbers], Windows 98 was the fastest of all," Far said. But there's a downside: Windows 98 does not support wear-leveling technology, which evenly distributes data writes to NAND flash memory to ensure no single area of an SSD wears out faster than another. Far said his company's SSDs would wear out in only about a year when running Windows 98.
That brings users who may be wondering about the advantages of SSDs back to the Big 3 operating systems: Windows Vista and XP & Mac OS X. The claims & counterclaims about SSD technology & operating systems highlight the intricacies of marrying operating systems designed for hard disk drives with the newer technology of SSDs.
