Cool Buddy
Wise Old Owl
I have an Asus Vivobook 14 laptop (full config in signature). It came with a 4 GB soldered RAM and 4 GB RAM in the only RAM slot. It also came with 250 GB NVMe SSD.
The laptop is mostly used for coding and internet browsing. I rarely watch any movies on it, but I do watch YouTube videos, mostly tutorials and stuff.
I want to do the following upgrades to it:
RAM: Want to upgrade the 4 GB module to 8 GB. Why? Three reasons (skip if you're in a hurry):
SSD: Wish to add 500 GB SATA SSD. Why? Again, three reasons (skip if you're not interested):
So I have two questions:
The laptop is mostly used for coding and internet browsing. I rarely watch any movies on it, but I do watch YouTube videos, mostly tutorials and stuff.
I want to do the following upgrades to it:
RAM: Want to upgrade the 4 GB module to 8 GB. Why? Three reasons (skip if you're in a hurry):
- While for usual day to day use, 8 GB is enough, I sometimes want to try out Linux distros on VM. At those times, the RAM is not sufficient.
- Since there's no dedicated graphics, I have some RAM shared with the Vega 8 GPU, which means I don't have the entire 8 GB available.
- I need a 4 GB RAM for my Synology NAS. So instead of buying 4 GB for it, I am taking the opportunity to upgrade my laptop and reuse this 4 GB module in my NAS
SSD: Wish to add 500 GB SATA SSD. Why? Again, three reasons (skip if you're not interested):
- 256 GB is not enough from a long term perspective. It is generally ok because I have 1 TB cloud storage and I store less frequently used stuff directly on the cloud. But whenever I'm travelling, if I want to put a few movies on it, the disk space starts to run a bit low
- I want to dual boot it with Linux. I can't do that if I have my documents on the same drive. I will not have enough space and I might accidentally delete some files, don't want to take the chance
- Also, having my documents on a separate drive ensures that if anything goes wrong during installation/resetting the laptop, since it will only affect my boot drive, my documents will remain intact.
So I have two questions:
- Which RAM to buy? The internal soldered RAM is DDR4 2400 Mhz. I guess for stability, it's best to buy a RAM with the same speed.
- Which 2.5" SATA SSD (500 GB) to buy? Unfortunately the laptop came with only one M.2 slot, which is taken up by the boot drive. So I only have the option of 2.5" drives. I shortlisted Crucial MX500 and WD Blue. Crucial seems to be the better option based on reviews.