What exactly does, "lightning quick" mean to you?
Prior to switching to an M.2 drive, I used Samsung SATA SSDs. With the SATA SSDs, software, such as MS Word, would appear almost instantly after the double click on the desktop icon. Now there is consistently about a 2 to 3 second delay before the Word blue rectangular box appears. This is also true when starting other software, some with even longer delays I did not previously see. One application (Paperport) takes a few seconds longer to start and access large folders containing PDF files. Windows also takes a few seconds longer to get to the desktop when booting. None of this is consequential but it is is a change. I have gone to much effort over a lot of years to have my desktop computers perform satisfyingly fast. I don't have any particular reason for this I just like a computer that responds instantly and am willing to go to a reasonable expense and effort to achieve that.
I noticed this issue immediately after a periodic hardware upgrade in early 2016 when I switched to a Samsung 850 M.2 drive, new ASRock mobo, and CPU. My expectation was the M.2 drive would make the machine access and write data even faster. I again upgraded the hardware a few months ago (same CPU) with an ASUS mobo and new Samsung 860 but did not notice any improvement. Of course, all the hardware upgrades included a clean install.
With respect to your (Mandrake4565) FYI re my typo, I hope that did not distract from my question.
It appears to me the M.2 drive does not supply data as fast as the SATA SSD drives did. That is just an observation based on what I observed over the last two builds using M.2 drives. In my mind, since the mobo and associated chipset provide the management and pathways for data, it seems plausible a newer chipset (the Z370) might better manage the data transfers with the M.2 drives and provide faster performance. That was the essence of my question.
I appreciate the warning about the CPU. I did not expect that to be a problem as the Z370 boards also have LGA1151 sockets. My main question concerned the compatibility (without a clean install again) of the Samsung 960 Pro M.2. If clean installs were not a huge pain I would be curious to reinstall one of the SATA SSDs I have and see what happens.
