SanDisk: Vista Shortfalls Limit Use of SSDs

by , 3:15 PM EDT, July 23rd, 2008

SanDisk, a maker of Solid Stated Drives (SSD), said on Monday that Vista is not optimized for those kinds of drives, and suitable SSDs won't be available until late this year or next year. The SanDisk CEO admitted that his company didn't understand the limitations of Vista.

SSDs are currently available as options for the Apple MacBook Air and Toshiba Portege R500.

SandDisk's CEO, Eli Harari, spoke to the issue at their second quarter conference call and said that the design of Vista presents a challenge. "As soon as you get into Vista applications in notebook and desktop, you start running into very demanding applications because Vista is not optimized for flash memory solid-state disk," he said.

This is due to Vista's design. "The next generation controllers need to basically compensate for Vista shortfalls," Mr. Harari continued. "Unfortunately, performance in the Vista environment falls short of what the market really needs and that is why we need to develop the next generation, which we'll start sampling end of this year, early next year."

Mr. Harari placed some of the blame on his own company and said: "... I'd say that we are now behind because we did not fully understand, frankly, the limitations in the Vista environment."

Yesterday, in a story that has a tie-in, Peter Burrows with BusinessWeek surmised that analysts have misinterpreted Apple's strategy announced during the July 21 Q3 earnings report. "It's a well-timed move, and a time-honored tactic by market leaders in tough times. If your competitors can't afford to match you on price, why not accept a lower margin for a time and load up on market share (or force them to incur losses)?" Mr. Burrows asked.

Some analysts believe that Apple was referring to a MacBook related product that would use more expensive components and trade market share and low price for some Gross Margin. Mr. Burrows' prognosis for Apple competitors:

Pain.