>And they work better in many respects. For example, you wouldn't be able to recover from corrupted raw storage on the majority of SSDs, you'd have to throw it away and buy another one. Apple Silicon macs do a full low-level wipe when you do a DFU restore, so they can.
What did he mean by this? I've never heard of SSDs having "corrupted raw storage". They might develop bad sectors, but they can detect and work around them.
Block 0 of most SSDs is typically used for storing a whole heap of data that's pertinent to the operation of the SSD, most typically the image of the firmware. If you scramble that the drive's controller won't be able to boot. It then becomes a chicken and egg problem because if the drive controller can't boot you can't flash new firmware into the first block. You can possibly throw the drive back into debug mode and reprogram it like they do at the factory but that involves a lot of expertise and screwing around with low level hardware. From the perspective of an ordinary user the drive is pretty much bricked.
In Apple's case there's a BootROM literally laid out in the mask of the secure enclave. It's read-only and it's permanent. This BootROM has a fallback that can be used to at least load a new iBoot image from scratch. So even if the NAND on the flash is scrambled you can still boot the machine in DFU mode, install a new iBoot, and bootstrap the machine from there. You won't have the data but at least your NAND still works.
Because the chance of something bad actually happening is vanishingly small in this day and age. The biggest risk of bricking an SSD is if someone pulls the power while they're upgrading the SSD firmware which is why vendors have the warnings not to do that while one upgrades SSD firmware.
Sounds like they have created a proprietary customer-oriented solution similar to zoned namespaces (ZNS) [1]. I wonder if other companies will follow, because there are some significant benefits. But hopefully they'd just use the open standard instead...
What did he mean by this? I've never heard of SSDs having "corrupted raw storage". They might develop bad sectors, but they can detect and work around them.