Reply To: HDD upgrade

[Anonymous]

@amita

No problem. You should be able to source a 512GB from China pretty easily. Have a search on AliExpress – there’s one for $120 or so.

Just be aware that most of the cheapo SSD brands will buy ‘less than perfect’ grade NAND chips from larger fabs like Micron, Intel and Samsung. While these are perfectly fine and will generally last as long as a leading brand under regular usage, they may have some minor defects.

For example, they may require a little more voltage to work properly (and therefore produce more heat) or have a couple of remapped blocks during the factory testing. While Google say SSDs with bad blocks are likely to fail much faster, the rate of failure under general use case is so small and drawn out that your laptop will last just as long, so don’t worry about it too much.

Sometimes the cheaper Chinese brands sell really great, flawless SSDs because other brands just daren’t delve into that space. None of the major Western retailers are selling 512GB SSDs in the 22×42 form factor — at least, not since Transcend discontinued theirs due to heat problems. But it’s a fact of life that when you’re squeezing so much onto a tiny PCB, it’s going to heat up, especially if you’re heavily reading from and writing to it. If you get one of the KingSpec ones, don’t worry too much about heat, but pop a thermal pad on the top and bottom of the SSD so that both sides make contact with the laptop’s chassis. That will help dissipate some of the extra heat.