It really depends on what you are doing. For games the initial load speed and possible level changing can be increased significantly. BUt you don't need PCIe to do that.
Your motherboard supports SATA3 600MB/s. A normal hard drive does about 50~80mbs.
Most medium SSD's perform around 300MB's so you not even getting half the bandwidth. It seems you got enough dosh to splash out so you can read this comparision and realise that the fastest on there only goes up to 550MB/s (but it is linear read not random)
So that is already up to 12 times faster than your traditional hard drive.
Fine. PCIExpress gives you 1Terabye/s because they use RAID and special techniques to increase linearly read.Like a Revo Drive.
I would suggest use a normal SATA SSD for your OS, then load all your games, applications and intensive stuff onto the PCIexpress card. With 16GB ram that should be a cracking PC (You could put your swap on the PCI Express)
PS- You can put your PC into sleep mode instead of booting each time. Windows 7 and 8 is built for that. Press button, Windows is active in 1 seconds. No need to boot each time.
There are two ways a motherboard can provide more PCI-e lanes then the chipset provides:
- Some modern CPU's provide PCI-e lanes of their own. (in addition to the lanes provided by the chipset)
- There are PCI-e switches which provide extra PCI-e lanes. Think of this as an
Y shape. The bottom of the Y can be 16 PCI-e lanes connected to the normal places on the motherboard (e.g. to the chipset or to the CPU). The upper two parts of the Y also provide 16 lanes but can not sustain full thoughput from both cards to the rest of the system of both at the same time. However it will work fine when sum of the bandwitdh of the 'upper Y connection' does not permanently exceed the based bandwitdh.
This can work fine if both cards want fast but bursty data.
Edit: some of those switches also allow card-to-card PCI-e connections. This is relevant because a common setup is to have two GPU's connected via PCI-e. (NVidia SLI, AMD XDMA). In such cases, bandwidth to the rest of the desktop is less of a constraint.
Best Answer
This SSD using PCIe x4 3.0. Based on the specifications on Lenovo Thinkstation website, Lenovo P300 motherboard supports PCIe 3.0, and have PCIe x4 line, so you can use it for this SSD.
Of course, you can use both PCIe x4 line (16 physical) and x16 line slots for SSD drives, together or separately. But, according to specification, your workstation has the PCIe x16 graphic card onboard. So, without of removing the graphic card, you can plug to your workstation only one PCIe SSD disk.