[minedwiz]

Somewhat related, SSDs run an entire microcontroller on-board to translate from I/O requests from the OS to proper use of the flash hardware.

[vlovich123]

If I recall correctly that’s not the case on Apple platforms. They do the translation themselves across raw NAND.

[monocasa]

No, there's firmware on the Apple NVMe drives doing FTL, etc. and exposing a traditional block device.

[my123]

It's on the main SoC on M1. (ANS2 block, with the FW being loaded by iBoot1)

NVMe exposed as an MMIO device directly, not as a PCIe one.

[vlovich123]

My knowledge was about the first iPhone since I swear I sat next to the guy implementing it (I was an intern at the time). Maybe Apple was just writing the FW themselves and I’ve misremembered? Apple devices definitely have better I/O performance than any other mobile device from what I recall.