Vista IO technologies

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Microsoft's latest Windows operating system, Windows Vista, includes a number of new I/O technologies and enhancements that are intended to shorten the time taken to boot the system, improve the responsiveness of the system, and improve the reliability of data storage.

Contents

[edit] ReadyDrive

ReadyDrive is a feature of Windows Vista that enables Windows Vista PCs equipped with a hybrid drive to boot up faster, resume from hibernation in less time, and preserve battery power. Hybrid hard drives are a new type of hard disk that integrates non-volatile flash memory with a traditional hard drive.

In June 2006, David Morgenstern wrote an article for eWeek suggesting that ReadyDrive might sacrifice data-integrity for speed and battery savings.[1] His article contains fundamental misunderstandings, ignoring, for example, that SuperFetch does not cache writes, and Microsoft has stated that flash will last more than ten years in operation [1]

The drive-side functionality will be standardized in ATA-8.

[edit] SuperFetch

SuperFetch prioritizes the programs you're currently using over background tasks and adapts to the way you work by tracking the programs you use most often, at what times of day that applications are used and intelligently preloading these into memory. This also improves performance in situations where running an anti-virus scan or back-up utility would result in otherwise recently-used information being paged out to disk, or disposed from in-memory caches, resulting in lengthy delays when a user comes back to their computer after a period of non-use.

While the necessary files by default are loaded into main memory, Windows Vista has the ability to instead use alternate storage methods, such as USB flash drives, which, though not as fast as RAM, often can be significantly faster than a hard disk drive; thereby freeing up main memory.

[edit] Transactional NTFS

Transactional NTFS (abbreviated TxF) brings the concept of atomic transactions to the NTFS file system, allowing Windows application developers to write file output routines that are guaranteed to either completely succeed or completely fail.

Transactional NTFS is implemented on top of the Kernel Transaction Manager (KTM), which is a Windows kernel component first introduced in Windows Vista that provides transactioning of objects in the kernel. The NTFS file system already supports journaling of low-level operations, such as writing a block of data. Transactional NTFS expands on this capability to include:

  • Atomic operations on a single file:
A common example of this is saving a file from an application; if the application or machine were to crash while writing the file, then only part of the file could be written, possibly resulting in a corrupted file. This would be a very significant problem if a previous version of the file was being over-written, as data would likely be lost.
  • Atomic operations spanning multiple files:
If an application needs to update several files at once with a set of changes, all the necessary file operations can be performed as a single transaction, preventing inconsistent updates in the event of a failure.
  • Atomic operations spanning multiple computers:
Performing the same operation on multiple computers is a fairly common administrative task in a corporate network; Transactional NTFS integrates with the Distributed Transaction Coordinator to ensure that the change is successfully applied to all machines.

Transactional NTFS allows for files and directories to be created, renamed, and deleted transactionally.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ David Morgenstern (June 10, 2006). Is Vista Heading for a Flash Nightmare?. eWeek. Retrieved on 2007-02-22.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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