Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

This is a bad idea for a lot of reasons. A well designed system has components that just work and have standardized interfaces. What you're suggesting is that each device should be totally unusable unless the machine has the specific software running that knows how to use it. That's poor design.



Thats how... pretty much every peripheral in existance works. You need webcam drivers. Video card drivers. Sound card drivers. USB drivers, at the least for generic HID devices. Nothing stops there from being common standard generic SSD drivers, where vendors could publish their own if they had an optimization.

Right now the SATA interface prevents anything like that from happening, and the market has already moved to these proprietary broken controllers with braindead GL-class protocols to access them. (SATA, NVMe)


Any such interface for SSDs would need to be able to work with a dozen different kinds of flash, a few sizes for each, a wide range of quantities of flash chips, all while exposing the performance and endurance characteristics of the flash and the topology of its connection to the host bus so that the software FTL can properly tune itself.

You're asking for a hardware interface of unprecedented complexity and cross-platform vendor neutral drivers of comparable complexity to 3d graphics drivers, all for the sake of letting SSDs have "dumb" controllers for a generation or two before the technology changes enough that the controllers need to start translating things again.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: