It is Vista's fault that solid state drives aren't performing as well as its promoters had predicted. At least according to SanDisk's Chairman and CEO Eli Harari, who recently announced it has delayed the launch of optimized drives until next year to overcome serious performance issues with the operating system.

Speaking at the company's second quarter earnings conference call, Harari deflected blame for being behind schedule by claiming "Vista is not optimized for Flash memory solid state disks." According to Harari, SanDisk didn't fully understand the limitations in the Vista environment and thus now they are forced to develop new Flash memory controllers that can be built into SSDs to allegedly compensate for the operating system's shortfalls.

His statements were notably short on details, though. It would seem like SanDisk is just throwing out a red herring to draw the spotlight away from deficiencies in their SSD products, especially when we've already seen OCZ's Core SSDs performing at levels comparable to those of 10,000 RPM hard disk drives.