Bambi,
Thank you very much... mining the Passmark archives seems a very efficient way to get deeper perspective on how to pull the best performance out of these workstations.
With the Kingston Predator M.2 AHCI based PCIe not being made any more I've got to look at the SATA III approach, and will track down a proper PCIe to SATA III card.
May I ask a favor.... for a simple Z400 build that will not use RAID and will use one SATA III SSD as boot/applications drive what would you recommend? This would be for a dedicated workstation using a few applications and needing minimal documents storage..... cases come in, are read out, and automatically deleted.
Scott