[AFMUG] OT - PCI-E enterprise SSDs

[Ken Hohhof via Af]

So I've been impressed lately with the performance improvements to personal 
computers and I/O intensive servers like web and mail servers by replacing 
HDDs with SSDs.  I'm convinced the emphasis on CPU and memory is often 
misplaced and the key is disk read/write performance.  I think part of this 
is our use of computers has gone from computing oriented to data oriented. 
Big, big data.  The one exception perhaps being games, but is that CPU 
intensive or GPU intensive?

So I've noticed there are enterprise SSD cards that go in a PCI-E slot like 
Intel S3700, Huawei ES3000, Samsung SM1715.  The performance numbers sound 
comparable to a very expensive RAID array of SAS drives.  It does raise the 
question, why are we making SSDs look like HDDs including form factor and 
electrical interface, other than for the hot swap capability of SATA/SAS?

Has anyone used these things?  Are they automatically recognized by Windows 
and Linux as disk drives?  Do you need to load special drives and jump 
through special hoops?  Is there any point trying to do RAID with these, and 
can that even be done?