Huh!?!?!?
"Abandoning HDD interface paradigm for SSDs"
I might be naive... I'm just a lowly system level developer with a background in electronic design as a hobby, but.... Oh, I also released for review (didn't publish it properly, but it got around) the design of a new RAID system which a year later was shipped as BeyondRAID (without giving credit where credit was due). Of course, that's fine since I really designed it and released it so I someone else could implement it and I could buy one :) would have been nice of them to toss me one for free though... after all, I spent a year designing the system on napkins.
IDE was basically an ISA bus interface for hard drives. It moved the physical controller from the adapter card or motherboard to the drive itself. The only real task which the controller card was there for was basic addressing support. It trimmed the 16-bit address bus to a 3-bit one.
What's quite funny is that for the most part, the IDE interface stayed almost 100% compatible with the original MFM controller style of addressing drives for a very long time. This was quite different from SCSI which overloaded the BIOS disk I/O interrupt (the ancient alternative to a syscall interface) to map to a SCSI vendor specific BIOS. IDE didn't need this since the IBM AT BIOS already understood the I/O interface of the MFM controller cards. The biggest change to the spec for years (at least until we needed to try to abandon the physical addressing method in favor of LBA) was support for the drive to report its own information for auto-configuration.
Most of what we call an API to the SATA drive interface today is actually mostly based on the original MFM controller API specification with the few changes that the drives are no longer addressed physically, the drives provide feedback about their state and the drives no longer reside at fixed memory addresses. Oh, there are extensions as well for things like NCQ, but in theory, using a SATA to IDE ser/des, an IDE to ISA adapter (not controller), an IBM AT at 6Mhz should be able to address at least the first 128 megabytes of the latest SATA-II drive on the market.
This step was actually a logical step back to our roots with a few exceptions.
1) Connecting more than one drive to a single PCIe slot will require either sharing the PCIe lanes of the slot across the connected drives OR a PCIe switch will be needed to create more lanes for the traffic.
2) RAID will have to be performed in software. When increasing the performance of the drives to near RAM speeds, the CPU will just not be able to keep up with the massive amount of XORing involved. zRaid is possible, but ZFS is not very flexible unless working in predefined bank sizes.
3) Enterprise computing will have to wait for a cross between an XOR engine and switch for RAID to come around. I'm sure there's a market for it... but it's almost certainly not the right way to do this.
A long ass time ago, it was either maxtor or micropolis (hard drive companies which I think are both now absorbed by Seagate) came out with a nifty concept based on SCSI. What it was, was a stacking hard drive subsystem. You'd buy a base stand which connected to the PC via SCSI-I (it was just called SCSI back then as there was no SCSI-II or later) and then using a simple shifting mechanism, each drive which would be placed on top of the stack (up to 7 of them) would find their ID from their position in the stack and add themselves to the bus. The system was nothing more than a plastic box with a fan, a hard drive and a connector. But the idea was perfect. Still have no idea why it never caught on after. I have since designed systems which would use a SAS cabling to do something similar for up to 4 SATA or SAS drives, but I lack the skills to route the 6Gbp/s signals and haven't paid anyone to do it.
The system was absolutely perfect though. So, the best thing to do here is to stop caring about the existing hard drive form factor. You can always make mounting brackets to make them fit in drive bays. But instead would be to extend the PCIe bus using a 8x or 16x cable from the motherboard to a chasis. Then, mount a PCIe switch on the chasis main board and extend 4 to 16 PCI channels to each storage device stacked on top of it.
Then, configure design a new Flash SSD controller which would allow each device to act as
a) a plain old drive
b) an active normal member of a RAID which will either write data directly or maintain an XOR of the data of the other devices for the given stripe.
c) a spare member which will remain idle until it is needed.
The drives should be inserted into a cage using a backplane. And to eliminate need for fancy cooling solutions, should not have a case, they should be a raw board. This way the SSD RAID can either be submerged in a coolant or can be cooled using a simpler fan.
The result would be an extensible redundant device with absolutely insane speeds (the addition of each drive would increase the performance of the RAID linearly) and it would be extensible so long as there's more room in the PCIe switching fabric. Oh... for RAIDing, it might be necessary that the switch doesn't purely switch so much as convert PCIe unicast to PCIe multicast so all drives can listen. Although a more intelligent method would define a multicast for each of the drives and then multicast the bursts to the devices whose listening for data within the given stripe.