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Solid state disks are kind of the next big thing, right? They have no moving parts, like hard drives, and are both more durable and offer potentially faster read and write speeds than hard drives. Sure, they’re far more expensive at the moment, but prices are coming down. And as Asus, Acer, and others have shown, if you’re marketing a laptop as cheap, ultraportable, and durable, you can get away with using low capacity flash disks.

But what if you want the best of both worlds: a fast, durable solid state disk with a high storage capacity? Then it looks like you’d better stick with Windows XP or Linux for your operating system. CNet reports that SanDisk officials are saying that Vista isn’t optimized for solid state disks — and the current generation of solid state disks aren’t optimized for Vista.

SanDisk is working on higher capacity, faster solid state disks. But because Microsoft has effectively told PC makers to stop installing Windows XP (with an exception for low end laptops like the Asus Eee PC the MSI Wind), SanDisk expects that most next generation computers will be running Windows Vista. And Vista doesn’t perform well with SSDs, so SanDisk has to design workarounds to cater to Vista’s demands instead of vice versa. For that reason, SanDisk is behind schedule in developing 128GB and 256GB solid state disks.

[via Small-Laptops]