Future storage technologies and Linux

One of the reasons the drive firmware is faster is that on startup, the drive can start figuring out where all the data is before the OS boots. The advantage is bigger for solid state drives, where the controller doesn't have to wait for the drive to spin up. If the OS controlled everything, it couldn't start reading that data until the OS got to the point of reading the data. Plus, the "native" drives couldn't be used as a boot drive, as the BIOS wouldn't know how to read it.