Microsoft: "Windows 7 is automatically tuned to work efficiently on SSDs"

We'd all like to be able to afford a solid state drive (SSD) such as Corsair's P256, and if you just so happen to be picking one up, you may want to consider using it with Microsoft's Windows 7 RC.

That's the message being sent out by the Redmond giant's storage and fundamentals teams, who together state that Windows 7 has been engineered with SSD operating characteristics in mind.

Speaking on the Engineering 7 blog, Microsoft's Michael Fortin highlights the advantages and disadvantages of SSDs, and details how Windows 7 hopes to overcome the latter with a series of SSD-specific refinements.

As those who've been following the tech will know, SSDs can offer mixed performance depending on the workload - particularly when it comes to random writes and flush requests. Such is the complexity of flash memory, that flash cells need to be erased before they can be written, a complex error correction logic is needed to ensure electrons don't fall into the wrong cell - and there's also the fact that flash cells eventually wear out.

SSDs, then, are anything but perfect - so what's Microsoft doing to help their case? Well, a couple of things. Firstly, Windows 7 will introduce support for the Trim operation. As a result, SSD's that support the Trim attribute of the ATA protocol’s Data Set Management command will be flagged by Windows 7, allowing the OS file system (NTFS) to tell the ATA driver to erase SSD pages as and when files are deleted. By doing so, subsequent writes won't require a blocking erase operation, says Microsoft.

Secondly, Windows 7 is said to perform well on modern SSDs as a result of an engineering emphasis on reducing the frequency of writes and flushes.

Elsewhere, the operating system is pre-configured to recognise SSDs and will treat them according to determined performance. Microsoft tells us that Windows 7 will disable disk defragmentation on all SSDs as standard, and SSDs deemed by the operating system to have good random read, random write and flush performance will automatically run with SuperFetch and ReadyBoost disabled - features designed primarily to bolster performance on traditional hard disks.

It all sounds promising on paper, and though we've yet to put SSD performance in Windows 7 to the test, Microsoft appears to be making a concerted effort to support solid-state media and states that it "expects more and more PCs to be sold with SSDs in place of traditional rotating HDDs".

If you're interested in reading more on Windows 7's SSD enhancements - including a useful set of frequently asked questions - head on over to the Engineering 7 blog.