By "vendors", I meant drive and controller vendors rather than server/appliance vendors. They're looking for ways to differentiate their products and offer more value add, but extending an SSD's functionality beyond mere block storage (potentially with transparent compression or encryption) requires a lot of buy-in from end users who need to write software to use such capabilities.

I meant the Seagates and WD's from this world. Around 2014 they also had HDDs with an extra core, where I suspect they just got that for free from they supplier with the message "look, we stopped making these single core CPUs anymore, here's a dual core for the same price".

WD and Seagate are their chip vendors. They design their own custom SoCs.

In case of Seagate's Kinetic Drives, one core was used by the controller, the other 'extra' CPU was used to manage a Key value store on the driver. These were ARM processors. I don't think they make these themselves.

You would be wrong. I work with guys who used to do SoC design for both Seagate and WD.

This is how WD was able to jump to RiscV so quickly; they didn't have any suppliers they needed to negotiate with, and the market for CortexR style in order, single issue, fully pipelined real time cores is sort of a commodity.

Well, that's why I was asking. Thx!