ADATA SU800 256GB 3D-NAND Solid State Drive

I bought a new Asus Q524UQ laptop and was really struggling with how slow the included 2 TB 5400 RPM hard drive was. The computer took forever to start up and seemed particularly awful when it was attempting to install updates. I was glad to see there was an open M.2 slot in the computer and, as I'm sure many people viewing this item have, found that this was one of the cheapest options available. I decided to take a shot with it and am very pleased with the results. The installation of the drive could not be easier. The most difficult part really was remembering where I left the screwdriver I needed to open up my laptop, though that was more the fault of Asus for using a weird screw and me for not being very organized. Once I had it popped open installation of the drive took about 10 seconds. It pops right in the slot and then you have to screw it down. The one thing to keep in mind is that you will need to have your own screw. The drive doesn't come with one and in my case the laptop didn't have one preinstalled either. Fortunately I had one, but if you don't you will need to acquire it. I believe it's an M2x3mm screw. From there the slightly tricky part was moving the OS from the original HDD to the newly installed drive. There are actually two methods I used and both worked without much issue. The first option I tried was simply cloning the drive using Macrium Reflect software. The process was fairly easy and since it was a brand new laptop I just copied everything on the hard drive over, went into the BIOS, and changed the boot order. The difference was night and day. Booting from this drive took mere seconds compared to the rather lengthy process with the original drive. Although the clone option was easy, I ended up using a flash drive to do a complete reinstall of Windows 10. The main reason I switched to this was because the laptop came running an older version of the OS and it was easier to start fresh with the newest version one time than to keep going through the update process. This also wiped out all of the Asus preinstalled software that I didn't really want. If you have a computer you've been using and don't want to lose anything I'd recommend the clone option. For a newer laptop or just one that's full of bloat that you don't care about losing it's probably easier to start fresh with the flash drive installation.