A:AnswerThe thinness of the laptop requires Asus to solder components to the motherboard in order to save space. You sacrafice some upgradability for portability.
A:AnswerI actually did test this as i upgraded to a faster SSD, the M.2 connector on this laptop is PCIe Gen 3 but speeds are still good, on my Gen 4 SSD i get around 3800mb/s read and write so it's not bad at all.