The firmware's job is wear leveling - making sure all the sectors wear out at about the same time, which they do a great job at. But SSDs can write so fast that

The firmware's job is wear leveling - making sure all the sectors wear out at about the same time, which they do a great job at. But SSDs can write so fast that you can burn out the drive in months (maybe even weeks?) if you wanted to. There's nothing the firmware can do fix the limitations of flash itself. The important thing to keep in mind is that for write heavy workloads, you need to keep write amplification in mind. I remember an adjacent team to mine that had to store several gigs of data which changed often, but only a small percent changed at any one time. They needed to recover quickly from a crash so they wrote it to disk. But they wrote the entire data set out to disk after every update, instead of keeping it in e.g. rocksdb or even sqlite. Their entire fleet burnt through their SSDs at about the same rate, so machines were dying in rapid succession, ouch. Write amplification is a real problem, but SSDs great performance often masks it being an issue until down the road.