recommended SSD for Aspire E15 E5-756G

joycee37 said:

thank you. there's something I want to ask. which is better the portable ssd or the internal ssd? do they have different speeds?

They ought to, portable SSDs are just internal SSDs packaged in a SATA/mSATA/NVMe/You-Name-It to USB/Thunderbolt enclosure. There's always a translation penalty changing from one interface to another. The only way there would be none, or negligible is when it goes from NVMe to Thunderbolt, but rule of thumb: internal it's better.

That is, unless you have a machine that only wired 2 PCIe lanes to the M.2 port vs. a 4-lane NVMe mounted in a USB 3.2 (Gen 2?) enclosure or Thunderbolt. But I don't think there are machines that have Thunderbolt ports and then go about with 2-lane M.2s inside hahaha

Nevermind, I digress, @brummyfan2 is right as usual, go for an NVMe SSD and you're golden .

joycee37 said:

does it make my editing faster? thank you. it's my first time to try it. im afraid it will damage my laptop or just a waste of money 

Tell us the complete model of your machine and we'll give you a better assessment, it's an E5-756G, but there are more letters after that (it should tells us your specs, Processor, RAM, drives it has, etc.).

For editing, a portable SSD has the advantage that it's portable, if you wanted to move to a desktop or edit in someone else's machines it would be a piece of cake; but for speed, less heat and all; internal all the way.

OK, so you have an i5 8250U and a 2TB mechanical hard drive (SMR-ing to death I suppose). How much RAM do you have?

Depending on the size of the projects you want to be editing, RAM plays a good part as well as the underlying media. The SSD is really a must, and with an NVMe one like the Samsung @brummyfan2 recommended you'll be pretty good. Having the OS installed there would also help, everything will go much smoother. Seriously, it's night and day going from a mechanical hard drive for the OS and the like to an SSD (even a SATA one).

If you only have the 4GB of on-board memory that I see listed in a site you may want to consider upgrading that as well, but as with everything, it depends on what you intend to do. Rendering a project can really make use of faster storage and fast processors.

I wrote a couple of guides that could prove useful to you when determining which RAM to get, or how to install Windows anew if you don't want to clone your current installation and want to have Windows in the SSD as well (I'd recommend it). For cloning though, you usually have access to free Acronis' derivatives or OEM versions when you buy a new SSD these days.

Here are the guides: Upgrading RAM & Installing Windows.

joycee37 said:

thank you. sorry but what is acronis' derivatives or OEM versions? 

That's a program to clone drives, right now you have everything in the 2TB HDD right? When you install the SSD, if you get an M.2 one, it goes in a different compartment (they're thing and elongated). The you'll have to choose whether you want to keep going as-is, and use that drive only as a data drive (to put your projects on for example and edit off of it), or having Windows there as well.

Going for the latter there are 2 options:

• Installing Windows anew, disregarding whatever there is in the 2TB HDD that came with the laptop.
• Cloning, which is copying everything you have in the 2TB drive to the new SSD. Everything would keep working as it is now, except way faster because the contents that need to be read are now in the SSD instead. The HDD could be formatted once the cloning is done and you know everything went well and used for data. Or taken off of the laptop and put in a USB enclosure to be used as a portable drive.

Acronis is a company that does back up and restore software, as well as cloning. They're a big one, and they generally sell their IP to drive manufacturers so they can ship locked down versions of the True Image software to be used just for cloning (if I'm not mistaken). Seagate for example renamed theirs to DiscWizard, but it is Acronis' True Image at heart.

Some sort of cloning software is usually bundled with newer drives in case you want to clone the old one to facilitate things free of charge. I used to use the business variant of True Image some years ago, Backup & Restore it was called (or just Backup... I don't recall), but now I'm Macrium's Reflect all the way. And Macrium, contrary to Acronis, has a free version for home users that does pretty much anything you'd need.

We could guide you either way, be depends on the disk you get and what you decide on doing. Samsung for example has its own data migration and cloning software, they don't rely on Acronis. Adata (or XPG), the one I have, did give me a key for Acronis True Image OEM version that I never ended up using, but it's there should I need it at home.

 For external NVMe drives there are plenty of enclosures, but I can't find one ready made already. It's simple enough though, you'd buy an NVMe drive, you'd buy an enclosure and insert one into the other. Connects over USB, Type-C or otherwise, but I'm warning you now that it will get toasty hehe.

I have a couple of enclosures and the one based on the Realtek RTL9210 seems to be less hot, it is made out of aluminium though.

As for the laptop, what I'd do would be:
 - Look into upgrading RAM possibly.
 - Get an M.2 NVMe drive and install Windows there, using it for editing the projects as well (or getting another one and putting it into an enclosure, I don't know).
 - Clean up the HDD the laptop came with and put it in a SATA to USB enclosure to be used as external storage, or to store backups of things, or projects once they're done, etc.

joycee37 said:

what should I prioritize first? the ram or the ssd? which has the cheaper price? if RAM, do you have any recommendation? thank you for educating me.

If you can only get one thing (RAM or the M.2 NVMe drive), I'd get the drive. Editing requires a lot of RAM, that's for sure, but switching to a speedier drive for the OS will make things much more responsive even with the base RAM the laptop has. Later on, RAM, getting 16 GB would be very interesting for rendering the projects you edit.

It also depends on what you'll be editing, it's not the same to edit source videos at 1080p with very little work done, as many 4K videos as sources; rendering to 4K too.

And there are 2 TB NVMe drives, like the Samsung 970 Evo. Once you get an SSD and switch or install Windows there, you'll appreciate the difference. To name but an example, from touching the power on button to being in the desktop in less than 10 seconds.