Comment by rektide

Circling back on this after being the first to post this (to original link[0]).

Went looking for a NVMe ZNS SSD to get started on and there's not a single one available to buy on the net. WD has a "Contact Sales" button for the zn540[1], which was annnounced as the World's First ZNS SSD... in November 2020[2]. Nothing on ebay, no-where; does not exist for real. Samsung announced a PM1731a in June 2021[3], but it too is not available anywhere, vaporware. Buzzkill!

The only relevant ZNS product news I've found since 2020 comes in March 2022, when WD & Samsung announced they are teaming up for ZNS SSDS[4]. Hopefully they actually ship something in 2023, but I'm not holding my breath.

And these are all of course super enterprisey drives. Why not, new feature? Barely supported? Super niche. Sounds like a good way to charge more money. But this would be such a huge help. And drives have to do so much less work with ZNS! There's so much less work around rewriting sectors, less work about translating addresses that ZNS can potentially offer. It's a direct & sensible system that abstracts the hardware. SSDs shouldn't "have ZNS support," they should be ZNS only (like SMR drives have been!). And it should be available at all market levels. Someone should try actually selling these drives, & trying to get the market created. Right now this seems to make all the sense, but it's like no one wants to try to sell a much more efficient & better product.

There is a QEMU emulator. But I don't think it's much of a performance simulator, and it'd be hard to know whether you db or nas loads or what-not really were improving as you built out the tech. I wish the actual story around this tech were much better. There's a dream here of cheap DRAMless SSDs that absolutely sing at absurd iops & don't have the absurd performance wall after the first 20minutes of use (alike Optane offered, albeit with the expected 10-100x higher latency).

[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-and-western-digita...