Review on Ableconn PEXM2-130 Dual PCIe NVMe M.2 SSDs Carrier Adapter Card (ASMedia ASM2824 Switch) - High-Speed 2X M.2 NGFF PCIe NVMe SSD Support for Mac & PC (PCIe x8, Non-Bifurcation Motherboard) by Michelle Singleton

My board only has one M.2 slot that supports SATA Express with a maximum speed of 10Gb/s (in testing the maximum speed is 8.3Gb/s), so it's for higher speeds practically unusable NVMe drives. However, not wanting to make a major upgrade just yet, I gave this little gem a try. I updated my BIOS to F9 "Future NVMe SSD Support" and received a WD SN750 NVMe Black 250GB 1TB to replace my 250GB 1TB VelociRaptor drives (will use them as backup for NVMe drives). The i7-5960X has 40 PCIe lanes available. Using 32 lanes for 2 SLI cards (16 for each). There are 8 lanes left so I put the Ableconn adapter in slot number 3 which is 16/8x. Excellent. In the BIOS I noticed that the 2 NVMe drives are plugged in in reverse order. So the markings for 1 and 2 on the Ableconn adapter could be reversed, or it could be a bug in my BIOS. I just swapped the physical order of the two WD NVMes and the issue has been resolved. I'm using Windows 7 64 Ultimate and the drives weren't even recognized. Installing update KB2990941 resolved this issue. Incidentally, Microsoft removed this update, probably to encourage the transition to Windows 10, but it can be found elsewhere. I cloned a Windows 7 hard drive (C) to the first NVMe drive, shut down and removed the hard drive. Then restarted. Windows 7 was now running on an NVMe drive! Cloned a second disk (D) to a second NVMe drive, shut down, removed the disk and rebooted. All I had to do was change the NVMe drive letter to D: then all my games will work as before! Just load faster! Crystal Disk Mark tests show that two NVMe drives can reach the advertised speed. Wonderful! The only problem I had is a "cold and dark" start (turning off completely), the computer freezes on the first start. I have to press the restart button on the computer and it restarts/returns to the Windows desktop. I think it has something to do with my motherboard and not the Ableconn board because once loaded it works PERFECTLY. The only other issue is that the two LED headers on the Ableconn are very close to the motherboard connectors in the last slot. However, they clean different wires. I've just ordered a second Ableconn PEXM2-130 for use with Windows 10. It will be great to quickly switch between two operating systems and applications by simply removing/replacing the Ableconn board with a single thumbscrew.