Yeah, I’m curious how they would respond to the claims in the article. In [1], they talk about aiming for low latency, for consistent performance (apparently other SSDs could stall at inopportune times), and support on-disk encryption. Latency is often in direct conflict with throughput (eg batching usually trades one for the other), and also matters a lot for plenty of filesystem or database tasks (indeed the OP links to a paper showing that popular databases, even column stores, struggle to use the full disk throughput, though I didn’t read why). Encryption is probably not the reason – dedicated hardware on modern chips can do AES at 50GB/s, though maybe it is if it increases latency? So maybe there’s something else to it like sharing between many vms on one host