Solid state drives offer a very attractive performance increase over the old platter based hard drives of the past, unfortunately getting the most out of them isn’t as simple as plugging in the drive. Given the technology’s early state you’ll have to deal with firmware revisions and you might even have to question which operating system you’ll be using with your drives.

The Tech Report has a look at how a batch of SSD drives perform under Windows Vista and go in depth with their findings:

Still, since Windows Vista drops XP’s default partition offset, we decided to test with it next. We updated our test system’s hardware, as well, combining a Core 2 processor with 4GB of memory and Intel’s most recent ICH10R south bridge SATA controller. But does this drastic overhaul change the SSD performance picture any? We’ve subjected drives based on controllers from Indilinx, Intel, and Samsung to a battery of tests in an attempt to find out.

They’ll have to rerun these tests once Microsoft’s Windows 7 is officially launched but they enjoy that sort of punishment.