[pkaye]

Speaking as someone who used to work on SSD firmware, here are some rambling thoughts... Yes moving some of the FTL to the OS will help a lot in reducing the complexity for the SSD developer but the problems are just moved up the levels. The OS will probably still have to use a COW scheme aware of the block and page size restrictions of the underlying flash. And you can't do a raw disk copy without accounting for defective blocks. Maybe the SSD will still handle basic ECC protection and data scrambling but the OS will now have to handle read disturb, wear leveling, defect management, and data recovery using signal processing. But many of these characteristics will change from one NAND technology to another so someone will have to characterize and update the algorithms. I would actually say it is this last bit that really trips up SSD firmware design. Otherwise you would think after an iteration or two of firmware we would have a solid design but the flash technology tends to bring up some new requirements with each node that introduces more complexity.