Hokay, so the card came in today. And it's amazingly fast. BUT I did not get anywhere near full performance out of it at first, and it took me a while to figure out why. Turns out it's the funky so-called x16 PCI-E slots on my mobo. But I'll get to that later.
First off, there is NOTHING that comes in the box with the drive except the drive card itself, and a tiny pamphlet that just shows you how to install the card in a PCI-E slot and secure it with a screw. That's it!
No drivers, no instructions other than that, no cloning software, although there are plenty of retail and free cloning apps out there anyway. I didn't bother checking the Plextor website for any cloning software because I use Acronis 2014 anyway. I'll look at the website later to check for a firmware update utility.
The drive comes with a very generous 5 year limited warranty - a rarity today among drive manufacturers.
This drive requires a minimum of an x2 PCI-E slot, or higher. My old mobo (Asus P7P55D LE) only has two x16 PCI-E slots (intended for two video cards in cross-fire) and two x1 slots. So I installed it in the spare x16 slot.
I left the old SSD boot drive connected and booted into an Acronis 2014 Rescue Flash Drive to initiate a clone of the old drive to the new one.
Upon POSTing, I got a brief Plextor BIOS boot display (similar to what you get if you have an add-on or RAID drive controller installed) which assured me that the new Plextor drive was recognized and initializing.
Acronis saw the unformatted/un-initialized new Plextor drive and I ran the clone. Since both drives were SSDs, even with the bandwidth limit of the old drive's SATA2 port, it only took 6 minutes to clone the drive (250GB maybe 60% full - this is only my boot drive containing the OS and personal data folders in a 2nd partition. Games, video editing folders, etc are all on a secondary 1TB spindle drive).
Disconnected the old drive, and booted the PC. It booted right back into Win7 on the new Plextor, requiring one reboot (as is usually the case when installing a new drive) so that Windows can properly register the new device in Device Manager.
All in all, as simple a procedure as installing a new SATA drive.
HOWEVER, the benchmarks were (at first) rather disappointing. Sequential reads went up a miserly 100 MB/s (from 260 to 360), although there was a big improvement on write speeds. Still, nowhere near the 700 MB/s this drive is capable of as you can see from these before and after benchmarks:
OLD SAMSUNG 840 ON SATA2 PORT:
NEW PLEXTOR M6e ON PCI-E INITIALLY:
I scratched my head for a while, and looked through the literature on my mobo, and I discovered something interesting (other than the fact that the manual was translated to English from Korean via Polish and Russian). This mobo seems to have an older Gen1 PCI-E bus (we're on Gen 3 nowadays). The blue colored x16 slot nearest the CPU is the PRIMARY and the manual recommends using the primary slot for single video cards because "it would be faster and utilize all 16 PCI-E lanes". This is the slot, of course, that I had the video card installed in.
Digging through the literature some more I began to figure out that this mobo's secondary x16 slot did not REALLY run at x16 (or x8, or x4 or x2 for that matter). It runs at x1 if there's only one video card installed in the primary slot. Both slots run at x8 if you have two cards installed in cross-fire mode. So this is why my shiny new SSD was running so slow - it was only running on an x1 PCI-E slot (even though it's a full size x16 connector).
I was tempted to drink myself into a stupor over this. Well actually, I would still have left the new Plextor SSD in there anyway, just for the small increase in sequential reads, and the much bigger increase in write speeds. But it would have been a crying shame to see only half the performance.
HOWEVER I got to thinking (and drinking). Why not swap the cards, and see if the SSD would run full tilt on the primary x16 slot?
SOOOO I swapped them and sure enough, I saw a TREMENDOUS improvement, with sequential reads hitting 622 MB/s!
NEW PLEXTOR M6e PCI-E ON PRIMARY PCI-E x16 SLOT:
Okay, that's more like it! The trouble is that I wouldn't be too happy with the video card running in x1 mode. I don't do hardcore gaming on this PC, but I do play a few games like Minecraft, Legend of Grimrock II, and some turn based games that would probably run awful on a single PCI-E lane. I don't use GPU rendering for transcoding (because frankly, I have yet to find any transcoder that looks worth a crap using NVidia GPUs), but I don't want any video lag in Photoshop or my video editor, or while watching 1080p video playback.
HOWEVER (thinking cap on again & more good bourbon!), the documentation for my Mobo implied that the secondary slot should have some extra lanes available if the primary was not using all 16 lanes. So, biting my tongue, I checked the System Info tab in NVidia's control panel, and sure enough it showed that my video card was running on a x4 PCI-E slot, which is not too bad at all. I can live with that.
Heck, it looks like the video card was never running over x8 on the primary slot, because my mobo doesn't support PCI-E 3.0 (I swapped the cards back briefly to check the NVidia System info, and it only showed x8).
I needed to do some cable management work, and move some drives around because the video card is now located lower down on the mobo, and I had to move some cards around, but all in all, I'm pretty darn happy going from 250 MB/s to 650 MB/s, and a major increase in write speeds.
HAPPY! HAPPY JOY! JOY!
ANYWAY, the take on this is (with a few caveats) that this is a nice SSD upgrade for an older system that doesn't have SATA3 ports - assuming you have a REAL x2 PCI-E slot (or better) available.
It also shows that M.2 SSD drives are the way to go on modern mobos that have M.2 drive controllers. The M.2 standalone version of this drive (without the PCI-E interface board) is around $30 cheaper.
