VIsta is the most bloated pos ive ever seen, no wonder it performs as shit. Win2000 was a good os, good old days...

Windows 2000 is Microsoft's last great OS!
It is still running flawlessly one my main storage server after 10 years with zero crashes.
The best thing about Windows 2000 is I purchased a 10 seat Disk for approx. $300. This is what I call, a Value Added product.

Vista and XP both have, what kernel geeks call, disk I/O elevators. Drive elevators are i/o optimization strategies surrounding the physical head position of the drive. A good elevator will re-order I/O requests to transfer blocks near the last head position to the front of the queue, and re-order subsequent i/o's in close neighborhood chunks. This is much faster than FIFO when you have a multi millisecond head movement cost. On Vista/XP, both OS's will pause approximately 10ms between major head movements. This wait is designed to anticipate and satisfy any new i/o requests that may arise near the heads local position.

These optimization are a boon in performance for 5400 and 7200 rpm hard drives but they will hold down the performance of SSDs. These optimizations will also negatively affect RAID arrays with battery backed-up cache, SAN's with large NVRAM cache.

Windows Server 2003/2008 are optimized for SAN's and RAID arrays large nvram caches. These two OS's use i/o elevators that expect mulit-head arrays and are tilted toward FIFO scheduling with deadline, out of order algorithms.

Linux gives you four io elevators. CFQ or completely fair queuing, Anticipatory (most analogous to XP/vista's), Deadline and FIFO.

My tests have shown deadline and FIFO fly with SSD's.

It stands to reason that windows 2000 lacks many of these head movement optimizations and thus perform better on SSD's than XP/Vista.

A way to test this theory would be to run benchmarks on the server version of windows. 2000, 2003, 2008 server use I/O schedulers that are optimized for Caching RAID controllers and SAN with large NVRAM caches.

No, SSDs run best on Solaris/OpenSolaris with ZFS. ZFS is optimized for flash-based drives.

I'm sure that there's a Linux file system out there that would support them better than the slightly dull and old ext3 they probably ran it on.

This article is irrelevant. SSDs should give VAST improvements in performance, so vast, that minus 5-8% would not even be a factor compared to HDDs. If you have to change back to windows 2000 for a 5% improvement in performance, that probably means your hardware isn't fast enough :P

Frankly, the original report is not worth mentioning.

Quote: "We're getting ridiculous numbers with Windows 2000,"

There is no explanation why the numbers are ridiculous or what the numbers are, except for the thing with the background tasks. No word of any double-checking or further research into this.

I wonder. Are web blogs taking over professional journalism?

Winrar and HDTune benches are also 5-18% faster on Win2k than XP and XP64 using raptors. But Vista64 is even slower than XP.

Another SSD rebadger who doesn't really put the R&D in to making products complaining about performance, you'd think after Intel SSDs they'd have learened to shush.

Sounds like a classic case of going back to something that has less features and overhead, and then discovering that it works more efficiently in the absence of same. Well and good if W2k still meets all of your computing needs, but...

^o)...are they arguing windows 2k uses the HD less and is thus, faster on IO bound tasks???

I'm a bit skeptic, but I don't systematically doubt that it can work well on Windows 2000. I'm fairly certain they'll be just as dandy under Windows 7 too.