ASUS Zenbook UX330UA - SSD Upgrade / NVME Supported!

Hi,

I am a new user and this is my first post, and I just registered to share some information about this topic. There is an old thread about this subject here, but as a new user I do not have sufficient privileges to reply there, so any moderator can feel free to join both threads.

I have an ASUS Zenbook UX330 (UX330UAK variant, Kabylake i5 7200 purchased in 2017) that came with an m.2 Intel 540 Series SATA3 240GB which I wanted to upgrade.

After a lot of Google searching all information I got was that this laptop would support only SATA m.2 storage, and this is incorrect.

Since it has an m.2 with M-Key slot, I decided to give NVMe a try despite all information I've found saying it would not be supported. I purchased a WD Blue NMVe SN550 (500GB) as an upgrade and installed on my laptop.

The good news: it worked! BIOS (updated to latest version 315) correctly identified the NVMe storage, and I was able to successfully install and boot Windows 10 from the NVMe storage without any issue.

The not so good news: despite of SN550 supporting PCIe3 at 4x, it is working only as PCIe3 at 2x on this laptop (confirmed by CrystalDiskMark results and by WD dashboard utility). So it seems that while the UX330UAK m.2 slot supports PCIe3 and does support NVMe, it operates with only with 2 lanes at 2x.

Below is the benchmark of the WD Blue NMVe SN550 on the Asus UX330UAK for reference. As you can see it is faster than the original SATA SSD, however it is being limited by the 2x PCIe.

 

I ran the previous CrystalDiskMark using the x86 version. Below is the x64 results that does have some improvements:

 

And below are some pictures from the SSD, BIOS and WD Dashboard: