Based on my experience of SSD drives - I've gone through a bunch of Samsung Evo's, WD and a few others and the Intel's have been flawless so far. In fact they've lasted 5x longer than any other. I did get them from a a friend at Intel.

Anyway, on that mobo, the spec sheet that I linked seems to indicate m.2 x 4 - why does it only support one ?

With a PCI 3.0 riser what would be the speed of the m.2 drives there ?

Basically I'm looking to see what is the fastest drives I could put in that. I need 3 or 4 SSD drives at the fastest speed possible, Right now, I don't absolutely need RAID as I flip between two and would just replace as needed if one failed, the 3rd one is for 'static' tables where RAID would be beneficial but speed is not essential.

Of course with 128Gb Ram I would also put most of the stats DB in memory anyway.

Hope this makes sense