Meet us at SNIA Developer Conference (SDC 2026)

Leil on Stage: Graceful Degradation for the QLC Era: Moving SSD Lifecycle Management to the Host

David Gerstein, CTO and Co-Founder of Leil, takes the stage to present a technical deep dive into a cooperative architectural shift: moving SSD lifecycle decisions out of the firmware “black box” and into the host filesystem.

As QLC densities rise, die and block failures have become a dominant operational concern at datacenter scale. Traditional firmware consumes spare blocks silently until the drive retires abruptly – often while 99% of its media is still functional. David introduces Host-Managed Over-Provisioning (HM-OP): instead of failing, drives gracefully shrink.
The session covers the full HM-OP workflow – health telemetry from 90/30/7-day retention counters, the cooperative handshake for proactive data evacuation, host-initiated MAX_LBA capacity-shrink, and durability through cluster-level erasure coding and hole consolidation – plus the NVMe extensions needed to standardize it. The takeaway: a “managed expense” model for wear-out that meaningfully improves TCO for modern flash deployments.

Connect with us during the conference to discuss HDD-Native™ architecture, SMR adoption strategies, and how Leil OS and Leil FS enable petabyte-to-exabyte scale without vendor lock-in.