“Since this laptop has no extra storage slots, how to clone the installed hard drives to a better one? I'm willing to buy it, but the SSD is small for my needs (512GB would be nice) and the HDD is super slow (1TB SSD Sata will do). Thank you.”
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I just recently upgraded my M.2 drive to a 500GB Samsung 970 Evo, and swapped the 5400 RPM SATA drive with a 960GB Sandisk Ultra II. According to ASUS support, the M.2 socket will only support NVMe drives, and only up to a max of 512GB. Since there aren't really any NVMe to USB adapters because USB doesn't have enough throughput for it, you have a couple of options: 1) If you have a desktop, you can get an NVMe to PCI card (I paid $14 for mine online). You can then remove the existing M.2 drive, connect it using the expansion card, and use your drive cloning software of choice. 2) You can download a tool like Clonezilla that can be loaded onto a bootable USB. You'll need to boot to the Clonezilla drive and save the clone image to the SATA drive. However, be aware that I couldn't get this to work when I tried it... for some reason, it wasn't able to find one or both of the drives. I didn't bother investigating this too closely. Other things to note: I've seen some reports that other people got SATA M.2 drives to work in this machine. I think it's likely that they have some other slightly different model that does accept SATA drives. I would stick with ASUS's specifications for the interface, and only use an NVMe M.2 drive of 512GB capacity or lower. Also, the ribbon cable and connector for the 2.5" bay is a bit fragile and it's awkward to unplug and remove the drive due to how they designed the connector. Be careful when removing it. Finally, you'll need a Torx 5 (T5) screwdriver and a spudger to even get into the computer. With my setup, this laptop goes from cold shutdown to logged in, on the desktop within 10 seconds. It was some hassle to replace the drives, but it was worth it.
Sorry, there was a problem. Please try again later.Its a nice balance for the price besides the ssd is big enough for the os and 1 or two of the games I'm playing at the moment and steam makes it super easy to move games from the ssd to the hybrid hdd. I tested it the hybrid sshd hard drive isn't isn't that much slower in actual real world uses i running fallout 4 off it i was only about 10s slower than the ssd on loading a new game .only coping large files on to it self you'll really see a difference.
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