[zokier]

My personal preference as a solution for this "problem" would be to make the drives dumb enough that the firmware wouldn't matter that much anymore. Something like ONFI flash with UBIFS. Flash chips are not such unique snowflakes that a generic software with some tweakable parameters could not manage them.

[JoshTriplett]

> Flash chips are not such unique snowflakes that a generic software with some tweakable parameters could not manage them.

Take a look at any of the recent reviews comparing drives with very similar flash hardware, yet with wildly different performance characteristics. Firmware matters.

I'd certainly like to see such devices with Open Source firmware, but don't discount the difficulty of the problem.

[nitrogen]

Also, we want to offload as much tedium as possible to secondary processors so the CPU is fully dedicated to our workloads.

[tracker1]

The same was once said for modems and audio adapters...

[pkaye]

The flash data sheets are actually just the starting point for using NAND flash. It is not just signal timings and command sets. There are lots of quirks you have to work around to make it reliable and usable which changes with each generation of NAND.