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I think this is an area where legacy support is really holding us back. I'd love to see us get to the point where we can just have a simple NAND controller attached to the PCIe bus. But doing that requires a flash-aware filesystem like UBIFS, and if you want to boot from it, bootloaders/BIOS that know how to read it.

We're currently stuck with PCIe->SATA controller->SATA attached NAND controller devices that implement their own wear leveling and bad-block management with degree of effectiveness widely varying among manufacturer's implementations. We have to use post-hoc benchmark results to attempt to reverse-engineer the the performance/price/longevity tradeoffs that were baked into the device.

I suspect that no mass-market ASIC company will be willing to get this on the market until Microsoft ships an OS with a native NAND controller driver and flash-aware filesystem and a system OEM contracts with their BIOS vendor to allow booting from the thing.



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