A protocol that enables communication between a host and an Input/Output (I/O) channel storage device, such as a Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) channel Dual In-Line Memory Module (DIMM) form-factor Solid State Drive (SSD), without the need to know or reverse engineer the encoding applied by the host. The control/status data are written to the storage device by sending a protocol training sequence of known values and storing the associated command/status data in the storage device in the same encoding format as that received from the host. These stored values are used at run time to execute encoded commands received from the host and to report status data to the host in the host-recognizable manner. A memory bank-based buffered configuration stores user data also in the as-received condition to preserve the host-specific encoding. This facilitates exchange of user data between the host memory controller and the storage device over the DRAM channel.