I've been looking at a mSATA SSD and a low profile pcie card for our Ceph cluster to free up the OS/journal drive slots for more 4tb spinning disks.
Good news is that performance is much, much better with 0.61 than prior releases. Both for RADOS and CephFS. We'll probably upgrade to 0.67 in the next few weeks and it's probably time to upgrade to the 3.10 kernel as well for btrfs fixes and to kick the tires on the kernel fs client again.