[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...