Why do you keep bringing up flash drives outside of the array?
Flash outside of the array makes no sense - you raise it as an issue repeatedly in your article. It's not relevant to enterprise storage. Flash storage as main storage is a relatively new technology that's had a few teething pains. There have been quite a few well publicized cases (Intel's self bricking drives, poor wear leveling algorithms from a number of manufacturers) that have resulted in some very high failure rates for what is otherwise an extremely low failure rate technology.. Using unprotected (non-raided) flash drives in enterprise systems (NetApp's market) makes no sense. Is there some reason you keep harping on this?