I'm glad that this article doesn't do any editorializing. Perhaps I'll put this site on my reading list. I can imagine that the impetus for this is exactly tha

I'm glad that this article doesn't do any editorializing. Perhaps I'll put this site on my reading list. I can imagine that the impetus for this is exactly that of hard drives of olde. Back when Sun (and Netapp, etc) used to have Sun-specific firmware, ostensibly more thoroughly debugged or at least somehow optimized for a particular workload (imagine locking some key ufs data in the drive cache, no matter the access pattern). Same for netapp and friends. Of course, this also enabled them to sell the drives for an obscene markup, but perhaps you did get some value add from it. Their target customer (large enterprise) didn't care all that much about the money grab; computers were just a tool and costs get passed to the end user. Back in ye olden days, I can completely believe that OEM drive firmware sucked in various ways, and that vendors actually improved upon it. Nowadays, I don't believe that for a second, for drives. For SSD, I am 100% certain that there are more crap ones out there than quality ones. This is Apple protecting their brand. You don't want large numbers of random crashes from a bad SSD to be finger pointing at Apple. It makes perfect sense, apart from the blind spot they have about their own quality (lol). As an aside, today vendors still play this hard drive markup game, but without the firmware value add. You can't buy the drive sleds apart from a drive and its 100% or more markup. Once the Chinese companies reproduce the sled, the vendors change to a new sled design. I don't quite understand why there is such a long lead time in cloning the sled. It can't be related to part complexity. There must need to be a certain volume of aftermarket buyers to make it worth reproducing, so around the time that used arrays become common enough in the market is around the time a new sled comes out. I don't follow right to repair much, but I hope making sleds and other such parts available is part of the agenda.