TP401M SSD Upgrade

About Asus TP401M Vivobook flip 14

The Asus TP401MA is a thin and light budget laptop. Microsoft store charges $399 CAD for this. It's a great deal if it suits your needs. It's not a gaming machine, but for web browsing, productivity apps, etc. the Pentium n5000 runs like a champ.

Specs

• 14" FHD display (in a 13" case) with touch and narrow bezel
• Pentium Silver n5000 quad-core
• 4GB ram
• 64GB eMMC storage

The beauty for me is that an SSD can be added.
The 4GB ram isn't upgradable, but Windows 10 runs on it without issue.
Here is a video of YouTube playing the amazing Andy Brown showing resource usage. As you can see, the ram is not a bottleneck. Nor is the CPU/GPU.

The issue is the 64GB storage. It's about half full right off the bat (Figure 1). I'll run out of storage real fast with media files and documents.

Figure 1. Factory eMMC storage

Upgrade

Add an SSD (View my YouTube video on doing the upgrade)

The TP401MA has an M.2 SSD socket, with a SATA III interface. PCIe would have been nice (and way faster), but it's awesome to have even this option in a budget laptop!

The original eMMC is very fast for embedded storage, but I just need more.

How To

1. Unscrew the bottom cover.
    a. The screws at the hinge edge and in the middle of the sides are longer than the others, so set
        them in a separate pile.
    b. There are 2 screws under the hinge edge rubber feet.
         Peel back the feet a little from the hinge side to remove the screws.
         Don't peel the feet off fully; you don't want the feet falling off later!
2. Slip your fingernails around the edge until you find a spot that will release.
3. Before you insert the new SSD, disconnect the battery to prevent a catastrophe.
    NOTE! The connector doesn't pull out, it lifts up.
                 a. Slide the little metal clip toward the hinge side,
                 b. Then lift up on the white connector to disconnect the battery.

                                                         Figure 2. Metal clip before sliding                                                       Figure 3. Clip after sliding; it doesn't move much

4. Now hold down the power button about 10 seconds to make sure the capacitors are drained.

5. Slide the SSD into the socket and attach it with a 2mm camera screw.
    If you don't have a screw, the bottom will prevent the SSD from sliding out of the socket anyway. I just
    happened to have one lying around.
6. Now press the battery connector down into its socket and slide the clip back.
7. Put the bottom back on and reinsert the screws and press down the feet.

Readying the SSD

1. Boot up and use cloning software to clone the eMMC data to your new SSD.
          a. I used EaseUS ToDo Free backup to clone the new drive; it has a clone function which will
              create an exact replica of the original drive, even the same size.

                                                                 Figure 4.  Clone function in EaseUS ToDo
        b. I used Computer Management's Disk Management function to extend the partition to the full
            disk size. 

                                                     Figure 5. Computer Management app                             Figure 6. Disk Management - extend volume function

2. Then reboot into the BIOS by pressing F2 repeatedly during POST.
3. Drag the SSD to the top position in the list.
4. Save your changes and reboot.
The SSD will now be your C: drive and the eMMC will be a secondary drive. You can just leave the eMMC as is or reformat. I just left it as is in case boot fails from the C: drive at some point.
Everything now works faster:

• Boot (after BIOS) went from 16 seconds to 11 seconds
• Wake from sleep went from 3 or 4 seconds to less than 2 seconds
• MS Word opens a new document in 1.5 second instead of 3 seconds

And I have all that new storage space!

Figure 6. After SSD installation

Formatting? This says 232 GB and I installed 250GB!

Just a note on the difference between the advertised space and the space shown in Windows: Some complain that formatting a drive eats up so much of the storage space. A little bit of space is lost in formatting, but the big reason for the discrepancy is the way the space is calculated.

For example, my 250 GB drive is showing only 232 GB! What gives? Drive manufacturers calculate storage space in decimal; a kilobyte is 1000 bytes. Computers, being binary, calculate storage space in binary; a kilobyte is 1024 bytes. It doesn't sound like a big difference, but try this; enter 250,000,000,000 (250GB) into your calculator and divide by 1024 three times. The end result after the last division is 232. So 250 GB decimal is 232 GB binary!

Really, no noticeable amount of space is lost in formatting; the same storage space is just being displayed differently.