I've been thinking about the possibility of "dumb" SSD devices.

All of the current HW-level performance hacks could actually get in the way if your software already enforces things like single writer, chunky writes and/or append-only log structures.

Give me a drive that only writes in 1 linear direction (until its full) and has a big red button to clean the entire thing all at once (which would clearly require some offline processing time & multiple disks for a realistic system).