I suspect that while vendors would like you to believe it’s all patented secret sauce, I’m more skeptical. There’s too many vendors and they all perform roughly

I suspect that while vendors would like you to believe it’s all patented secret sauce, I’m more skeptical. There’s too many vendors and they all perform roughly similarly with the controller chip speed and bus speed being more impactful. The FTL might be more impactful for disk longevity but I wouldn’t put much stock in consumer device numbers here. Even if Linux starts with an initially worse implementation, over time it should succeed because of cheaper costs multiplied by in aggregate a greater investment from stakeholders than any single private stakeholder could match. There’s a reason Apple and Amazon have written their own controllers and it’s largely because vendor solutions actually suck quite a bit when you start digging in.