The present disclosure generally relates to a flexible or soft architecture solution of a host-data storage device system. The host is permitted different, intermediate levels of responsibility to the memory management. The different levels of host involvement in the memory management of the memory device are anywhere between an existing zone namespace (ZNS) solution and an open channel solution. The data storage device offers a selection of specific memory management options to the host device. The host device then selects the level of memory management desired and configures the data storage device to meet the memory management selection. In so doing, the host device controls the trade-off between host device overhead of memory management and host device flexibility.