@MeatballB,
May be you don't need W10 to update the firmware.
Usually the NVMe manufacturer does offer a .iso file to buil a WinPe or Linux kernel bootable media (USB2 key).

@100PIER

No the firmware update utility is an executable. Don't believe they have a command line iso or anything. Doubt it would fix his problem anyhow. Wish he had another
board to test it on to see it works properly.

@davidm71,
No, i don't agree with you.
I have just downloaded the ISO file (.rar) from the Plextor site for the 1TB PCIe SSD to upgrade firmware to v1.05.
I have build from this ISO file via RUFUS a boot media key (USB2).
It is a Linux kernel boot media.
To use it you have to set CSM ENABLED into bios, and select the non uefi USB device.
I have no Plextor SSD, but the offered Linux Utility upgrade does boot on my PC.
The test done was only to check this Firmware utility.

@100PIER
Thats great to know. It wouldn't hurt to try.

Alright, so an update on my fighting to get the Plextor M8PeY NVMe drive recognized by my Z87 Fatal1ty Killer motherboard. No matter what I do, the machine just is not seeing the drive plugged into the PCIe slots, regardless of which slot I put it in, whether or not I plug SATA power cables (that I know work since they power other things fine) into it, or even if I pull out my GPU and only have the Plextor drive in.

On the plus side, I'm pretty sure it's not a bad drive. I've got a secondary machine, even older, running an old Gigabyte GA-B75M-D3H motherboard. That board has 2 PCIe slots in it, I plugged the Plextor into the second slot, booted up and immediately saw the 'BattleStar' lights and the board recognized the drive. Tried to reboot a bunch of times and tried both with and without a SATA power plug in the drive and every time it booted and the card lit up. I even saw the card listed as a bootable device in the BIOS. Because of this I was able to at least upgrade the Firmware up to 1.05. So at this point, I'm pretty sure the drive itself is good.

Unfortunately, that still doesn't really help me that much since the Z87 board just doesn't want to either recognize the card or give it enough power to get it running. I'm going to try getting it working a bit more, but there just may be a hardware specific incompatibility between this Motherboard and the Plextor NVMe drive and I may just have to get a new motherboard.

Again, thanks everyone for the help and suggestions!

@MeatballB

Do you have any other cards installed that could conflict with the Plextor? Did you try to disable every item in your bios peripheral onboard page? Did you try resetting the bios's configuration data? Pull the cmos battery and reinsert it. Perhaps the bios needs to reconfigure what devices are installed. Sounds like a hardware conflict to me maybe. Perhaps a newer beta bios version..

Well, I don't know why, but the card is working fine now. :) I'm guessing the firmware upgrade did the trick. Right after I flashed the firmware and popped it into the other machine, I got the lights and it was recognized in the BIOS and by a Windows installer. I'm typing this right now from a new Win10 install on that drive. I rebooted and powered off about 30 times just to make sure that it wasn't a fluke, and it seems to be working.

Must have been some incompatibility with the old firmware and this motherboard that they fixed in the latest version.

Again...thanks for everyone's help!

@MeatballB,
This is why I proposed to update to the most recent v1.05 firmware (the Plextor Release Note was explicit).

@100PIER - Yeah, thanks! I'm just glad that I had another machine I could get it recognized on to do the flash. Not sure how Plextor thinks someone can flash a drive to fix a bug that a machine can't see a card/drive if the machine can't see the card/drive. :)

I did have a quick question, while I'm seeing some great Read speeds, to be honest, the rest of the speeds look awful and slower than the Samsung EVO 840 I was using and even the Read speeds are 600 MB/s off from their claimed 2500 MB/s read speeds.



I'm thinking I might want need a better Win10 driver like one of the ones that @Fernando called out in this thread, but since Plextor doesn't have a specific driver put out, not sure which to try. I do konw that card/drive uses a Marvell 88SS1093 controller, but I only 91/92x AHCI / RAID driver, or some other possible reason I'm seeing bad numbers on everything but Reads?

Thanks again Fernando. I did go in and check the Polices, the "Enable Write Caching..." was checked, but "Turn off Windows write-cache buffer..." was not. I put a check in that box, rebooted and then re-ran a benchmark.



Again, not too shabby, but according to Plextor's specs I should be seeing up to 2500 MB/s Read, up to 1400 MB/s Write, Up to 280K Random Read IOPS and Up to 240K Random Write. The disabling of the Write-Cache buffer definitely improved the Write speeds, but as I'm only seeing 1700 MB/s Read, 1000 MB/Write, 154K Random Read IOPS and 180K Random Write IOPS, I'm still a bit off. I plan to reach out to Plextor's support when they open in a few hours, but if anyone has any other ideas I'm open to suggestions or should I just be happy with the great numbers those are? :)

@MeatballB

Out of curiousity when the Plextor drive posts at boot and that blue Plextor logo is displayed what link speed does it say its running at?