When solid state drives first started replacing HDDs, they had to fit into computer chassis or laptop drive bays built for HDDs, so they had to conform to HDD dimensions. However, there’s no requirement for the SSD to match the shape of a typical HDD form factor and that's becoming more obvious as of late.
I often tell people that SSDs work better with more free space, so anything that increases free space will keep WA lower. The two key ways to expand free space (thereby decreasing WA) are to 1) increase over provisioning and 2) keep more storage space free (if you have TRIM support).
I think we need to remember that as engineers and technologists. We get caught up in the short-term tactical delivery of technology. We don’t see the sometimes immense ripples in society from our work - even years later.
A few years ago, SATA-IO added a new feature to the SATA specification designed to reduce battery consumption in portable computer products. DevSleep, enables SSDs to act more like smartphones, allowing you to go days without plugging in to recharge and then instantly turn them on.
A number of years ago, the storage industry got together and developed a solution between the OS and the SSD by creating a new SATA command called TRIM. It is not a command that forces the SSD to immediately erase data like some people believe.
It’s worth pointing out that almost all the "magic" that has been developed around flash was already scoped out in 2007. It just takes a while for a whole new industry to mature. Individual die capacity increased, meaning fewer die are needed for a solution – and that means less parallel bandwidth for data transfer…
What is the #1 Real Problem for many large scale mega datacenters? It’s something you’ve probably never heard about, and probably have not even thought about. It’s called false disk failure. Some mega datacenters have crafted their own solutions – but most have not.