Windows 2000 best OS for SSDs

Saeed Arash Far, engineering manager at memory maker Patriot Memory, unveiled the best operating system for solid state disks is the aging Windows 2000. He found that Windows 2000 was about 5-8% faster than Windows Vista and Mac OS X 10.5. One of the reason for this is because this operating system uses less background processes.

That aging operating system, said Saeed Arash Far, engineering manager at SSD manufacturer Patriot Memory, 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.

"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.

More performance details can be found at ComputerWorld. Microsoft and Apple promise the next version of their operating systems will feature optimizations to improve the performance of SSDs.