They look like they’re trying to target the raw storage price floor. In such a market support costs could eat them alive.

As a market hypothesis, there are many folks hosting their own media/storage servers for various purposes. Often these servers run zfs and they can’t. Be oushed to the cloud due to inefficient pricing for TB scale, low frequency, low concurrency, moderate latency storage solutions.

Offering raw drives in zfs configs could crack this market, if customers buy into the raw drive solution then they can work on simplifying the solution and educating their audience.