I have the snappy Samsung 500GB 840 EVO, I have the $8 screwdriver set, and now it’s time to upgrade my Asus Zenbook ux32vd laptop. As you can see from the video the upgrade isn’t too hard, just a lot of tiny screws and shifting the battery around to get the hard drive out. Over all pretty painless.

The ram in my Zenbook has already been upgraded to an 8GB stick, I ended up using the value select because it was on sale but it might be worth it to spend a few extra dollars on the Corsair Vengeance 8GB stick so that your memory stays at 1600 instead of clocking down to 1333.

You can actually buy the Zenbook with an upgraded 250GB ssd and 10GB of ram for $500 over  the base price if you don’t want to hassle with it. However, doing it yourself does save you some money and gets you some better parts. Currently the 500GB 840 EVO SSD is around $300 and the 8GB stick of ram is under $100. So ruffly $400 to do it yourself or $500 with a smaller hard drive prebuilt.

EVO 840 speed test rapid mode

I haven’t had a lot of time to run speed tests on the new install, but I was able to quickly test out the Samsung 500GB 840 EVO’s “RAPID mode”. This uses the EVO in conjunction with 1GB of system ram in order to buffer both read and write speeds. The test above is from Samsung so it’s probably tweaked a bit in the EVO’s favor still it’s reporting 1164 GB/s reads and 974 GB/s writes. Running Crystalmark 5x at 1000GB last night, sequential I hit 986.7 reads and 869.3 writes which is very impressive. I’ll try and get some more speed tests posted towards the end of the week, but I think the Samsung 840 EVO currently my top pick for SSD drives.

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