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In three years or so, the flash manufacturers will put chips on the SSDs that will allow you to send down programs to them (not unlike the shaders in video cards). That will likely be a bigger revolution than SSDs themselves. Where we are now is just the beginning.

This sounds crazy. SSDs have all this firmware and processing power to make them behave like hard drives. If we want to drive the underlying storage directly we might as well rip all that out and let the OS drive the flash directly from the main CPU. Why would we want to be sending programs into the black box? What can the firmware do that the main CPU couldn't if we stopped attaching flash as SATA and instead just created a direct connection that can DMA back and forth to main memory?

Some Linux developers have made that point, that they would rather be implementing their own filesystems directly on the flash than dealing with a firmware that is trying to make it appear that the SSD is a hard drive but that then needs TRIM to work around the fact that that is not true. These firmwares are nice for Intel by letting them turn a commodity (flash) into a differentiated (and higher margin) product based on the code in the firmware. Considering Linux already has filesystems that can operate directly over flash and that better ones can be written I'd say we would be better off just getting direct access to the flash.

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