Hoping to get a M2 SSD now for boot drive so I can shift all of the data handling to the current Sata SSD.
You might get better performance by using the M.2 as the swap disk if your primary concern is performance after hitting swap space. If you're going to rely on swap space to do mission critical tasks, you should use the best hardware for the job. It's also likely that an M.2 SSD will have better 4k random performance than a 2.5" SATA drive. Just my two cents.
home variants of windows are not setup to handle very large pools of memory
They don't handle pools larger than the maximum for the edition, otherwise Windows 10 can be optimized to act more like a server and less like a workstation but, you're on the hook to do it. I think with what
@xkm1948 is doing, that Win 10 Pro is enough but, I agree. Linux might offer a little more flexibility when it comes to tuning the system for particular kinds of workloads such as the rate at which the kernel schedules tasks. These kinds of tasks benefit from fewer context switches.
