Btw: Since we needed to interface to SATA reliably via USB (from a raspi CM.) We ended up identifying a particular Taiwan-designed JMicron-based SATA/USB2 cont

Btw: Since we needed to interface to SATA reliably via USB (from a raspi CM.) We ended up identifying a particular Taiwan-designed JMicron-based SATA/USB2 controller that worked really reliably with Linux, unlike, say every single PRC-designed SATA/USB2 controller chip we tested. It was a pretty painful experience going through all of that testing. We bought 120 retail packages of that JMicron-based product, directly from the Taiwanese producer, just to be sure, to guarantee our first-gen production run. I think many RasPi users want a reliably high-speed, low-cost storage device. It doesn't make much sense for all of these users to have go through this very annoying process. It should just work. Since the chip cost for this by now is likely very small in the raspi kind of volume, why not?