Why don't they make a 'stupid', cheap SSD, without wear leveling, trim and such functions, for a really smart filesystem?
Or is that impossible?

for me these are different levels of functionality - or you can say different layers. A filesystem itself does not care about the underlying hardware at all, the hardware does not know itself about the filesystem(s) in use.

Who would buy it? You and a few dozen others, maybe? Manufacturers make whatever they think will sell. If there is no market, it's not worth their trouble, and I doubt there is a large enough market to make it worth their while.

They did make one a long time ago. It was a card that one would install common ram memory card to and it used a battery backup to hold data. Very fast for it's time.

What is wrong with the modern designs? They are pretty good.

Mechanical drives are still popular and priced inexpensively.

well, though the prices have dropped, large SSDs are still quite expensive.
I like hdd design better, where you know which physical sector you access (unless remapped) or something like that.
Also there have been some horror stories about SSD controller failing, data recovery is probably very hard in such cases.

I still feel there would be a market for such dumb SSD, and that they will be popular one day.

Yes, there can be problems and also your car may stop working because of a controller. But anyway you cannot use real physical sectors on hdds too, that is now virtual too. And probably much more complicated than an ssd.
"dumb" SSDs will die much faster

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It is not impossible. Your question stirred my curiosity, so I looked around and found this interesting article on Application-Managed Flash. I didn't read all of it, but I think they are saying it can bring some performance advantages. It sounds like they have to implement everything in the file-system software that the SSD controller normally does for you, but they can tweak it to obtain specific improvements, like decreased wear and lower latency. Pretty cool, but hard!

Edit: Upon further reading, I see that they still rely on the device controller to manage bad blocks and perform wear leveling. The article goes into the reasons for this.

I kind of doubt folks would go for the dumb drives.

#1 Cause they tend to be so expensive.
#2. Because they do require maintenance to prevent data loss. Who would want to fool with monitoring it every few seconds or what ever time they use to monitor.

To make a dumb drive, you'd have to have chips that don't burn out so much. It would be much slower.


I'd go to a ram drive. As long as they use flash type of ram then you will have the problem with monitoring and housekeeping. They need to use flash to hold data. Where as in Ram, they use either a battery or the computer power.

I had an SSD without trim once. Trust me, you do not want it.

sorry to dig this one up.
Here's an interesting link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_file_system

You are the OP, you can dig it up.

I've seen a number of good test results on F2FS.

The filesystem won't have much impact on the internal design of the drives as in the original question I'd think. All that helper work goes on behind the scenes.

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apple seems to use something like that now:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022...swap-them-out/