Advice / Review request

[Bangzong]

Hello all, Im posting in this area because I'm in a similar boat as the individual who made the original post to this thread. I understand a lot of people have been pointing in the direction of software development, but im curious on which route one should go to learn about the development of hardware, and how to implement said hardware to meet desired outcomes. I have searched a lot on the internet and have watched a lot of the LTT videos trying to learn about things from RAID to PCIe and the importance/benefits of said hardware, but one thing I've had trouble finding are things like, what materials are motherboards made of and why, what is every single component of a CPU/GPU, what are they made of and what is their purpose, and how do all of these parts work in conjunction to meet what it was built for. 

 

(Quick Bio); 25, USA Armed Forces (Field Artillery). Currently going to school online for an AS in Computer Applications. This degree path was the only online nationally recognized degree that I could find covered by the Army's Tuition Assistance and is labeled as teaching the introductory phases of both IT and Computer Science, as well as productive applications in the Microsoft OS. 

 

 I'm really interested in learning all there is you can learn about computers A-Z, but I also understand the probability of actually knowing all there is to know is very slim. So I figured with the resources available on learning software languages I could work on those on my own time. Needless to say I'm looking for ways to learn beyond what my current degree will teach. But again I would like to focus on the bare basic principle of the hardware components that are the standard to super computers used by the worlds leading technological companies. I guess I'm a dreamer, but nonetheless will appreciate anyone pointing me in the direction of sites or books I can pick up to start learning these things. 

 

As a request for a review is like to learn about the MSI Four-Way M.2 PCIe Card (That looks like a GPU). Will this item be as effective or more effective than Intel Optane PCIe SSD, can you force RAID between the M.2 drives on the card? 

Here's a link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/12987/msi-four-way-m2-pcie-card-it-looks-like-a-gpu