Are the speed advantages of m.2 great enough to be worth the cost of potentially three SATA slots? I haven’t had the pleasure of using it yet.
@absurdio,
For NVMe M.2 SSD's I would say yes but only as a system drive, IE to run the OS from.
The SATA interface was originally designed for Hard Drives (spinning rust) and whilst it has gone through three iterations (SATA, SATA-II, SATA-III) the best it can do is around 600MB/s. I don't think there are any hard drives (at least in the desktop class) that can saturate the SATA-III specification.
SATA-III based SSD are a good and cheep step up the drive speed ladder but are limited to the SATA-III specification.
M.2 SSD's drives come in two flavours :-
SATA based M.2 SSD drives still use the same electrical SATA-III interface and are therefore limited in in both read and write speeds, but they use the M.2 physical interface which means the are small and compact compared to 2.5" SATA SSD's. These types of M.2 SSD tend to share a classic SATA-III physical port on the mother board so for each SATA-III based M.2 SSD you install, you will lose a classic SATA physical port.
NVMe M.2 SSD drives on the other hand have the ability to run at much higher read/write speeds as they have their own on-board PCIe interface which means they have way more bandwidth (3000MBs +) and do not share a classic SATA-III port. Using a NVMe M.2 SSD as a system drive is highly recommend. Your OS will boot quicker as will opening and closing programs resulting a fast responding system which will increase productivity and workflow.
It looks like your Z97 has way more than the typical six SATA ports. Does that help skirt the above issue and/or do your m.2 drives still eat up those SATA slots?
The ASRock Z97 Extreme 6 has two M.2 slots/ports, 10 SATA ports and one M-SATA port.
Six of the SATA ports are from the Intel Chipset and four are from a on-board Marvel SATA-III controller that is supported by MacOS. This allows me to run a lot of internal drives.
I use Two Samsung 960 EVO M.2 NVMe SSD, one for MacOS at 4xPCIe lanes and one for Windows 10 at 2xPci lanes via the PCH. I have a mix of spinning rust 3.5" hard drives and 2.5" SATA-III SSD's connected to the SATA ports. Some are used for specific task's and some are for data and/or archiving. So yes having lots of ports does make things a bit easer.
do you know of hackintosh friendly 1151 boards that also have those extra SATA slots? I’ve found a couple of boards, but they aren’t listed in the recommended hardware lists.
I haven't built a Skt 1151 system so cant recommend anything perosnally, have a look in our buyers guide. If you want extra features such as more SATA ports then you'll need to look at the higher end motherboards they cost more but give you more features.
At the time i bought my ASRock Z97 Extreme 6 it was one of the most expensive and full featured Z97 mother boards on the market (it was the first motherboard to have a 4xPCi Lane M.2 slot for NVMe SSD's), but it was money well spent as it's still a very capable system despite being quite old now .. it runs an all core overclock of 4.8Ghz on my 4790K and is super stable as it had one of the most advanced CPU VRM designs at the time.
Like all things in life you get what you pay for, if you just need the basics then buy a basic mother board that is good enough, if you want all the bells & whistles then you have to go up market and spend more money but that usually results in a longer lasting system.
Cheers
Jay