NVMe doesn't require a PCIe slot. It just requires some lanes. You can use the 2.5" form factor with the same performance. It works really well. NVMe scales ju

NVMe doesn't require a PCIe slot. It just requires some lanes. You can use the 2.5" form factor with the same performance. It works really well. NVMe scales just fine. As for the livelihood of those selling these storage appliances, well check out NetApp stock price lately. Also,I wouldn't want to run thousands of these SAS drives in today's storage appliances. Even with high performance, the control plane and rebuild/rebalance stuff would be a nightmare. Trying to imagine a 50 node Isilon cluster with these things... not pretty.