The trouble with discard

Posted Aug 19, 2009 13:35 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
Parent article: The trouble with discard

> At the ATA protocol level, a discard request is implemented by a "TRIM" command. The protocol committee designed TRIM as a non-queued command. [...] (It's worth noting that the SCSI equivalent to TRIM is a tagged command which doesn't suffer from this problem). [...] An SSD is not just a dumb storage device; it is, instead, a reasonably powerful computer in its own right, running complex software, and connected via what is, essentially, a high-speed, point-to-point network.

This is probably a very naive question but... why aren't these "powerful computers in their own right" talking some higher level protocol like SCSI? Would something like ATAPI help here?