Upgrading the SSD in Chromebook & MyDigitalSSD Super Boot Drive M.2 2242 SSD Review
by Kristian Vättö on October 21, 2014 8:00 AM ESTFinal Words
Let's start with a conclusion of the Chromebook SSD upgrade before we move on to the actual drive. The positive news is that the upgrade process itself has been made relatively simple and effortless. With the built-in recovery tool the migration is easy and even the physical upgrade is only a matter of removing a handful of screws (although this may depend on what Chromebook you have). Compared to a Windows laptop, I would say the upgrade is easier as you do not need third party cloning software and the whole process takes less time.
Unfortunately, the good news mostly ends here. Because Chrome OS is designed for a web/cloud environment, it does not play nice with local storage. While you can technically have some level of file management inside the downloads folder, it is a compromise and the user experience is far from good. There is no proper music player for instance, so you are limited to using the Files app (a Chrome OS take on the Windows Explorer) for song selection, which works but is nowhere near as convenient as using Windows Media Player or iTunes for playback with support for playlists and other common features. The experience just feels incomplete if you are used to using Windows or OS X because of the limited functionality.
Moreover, at least in the case of our Acer C720 Chromebook the warranty will be voided if the SSD is upgraded. If you have an older Chromebook that is already out of warranty anyway, that is not an issue, but I would not recommend buying a Chromebook with an SSD upgrade in mind if the warranty has any value to you.
| Capacity | 32GB | 64GB | 128GB | 256GB |
| MyDigitalSSD Super Boot Drive M.2 2242 | $33 | $45 | $79 | $170 |
| Transcend MTS400 M.2 2242 | $40 | $50 | $77 | $135 |
EDIT: MyDigitalSSD also offers a cheaper Super Boot Eco drive with Micron NAND in up to 128GB capacity.
The third issue is price. Ultimately the number one selling point of Chromebooks is the low price, so it does not make all that much sense to spend ~$200 on the Chromebook and then fork out another $170 for the SSD upgrade. The 256GB is not the only available capacity, though, and the smaller capacities are cheaper, but to be honest it just makes more sense to buy a USB drive or an SD card for offline media storage since they are generally cheaper. You will also get to keep your warranty and external storage can be used with other devices as well.
Obviously, Chromebooks are not the only market for M.2 2242 SSDs. As the PC industry migrates from mSATA to M.2, we will see more and more designs using the M.2 2242 form factor for space savings. While the MyDigitalSSD Super Boot Drive is fairly slow by today's standards, it is one of the only M.2 2242 retail SSDs available (with the Transcend MTS400 being the only other drive that I could find). Then again, the laptops that use M.2 2242 SSDs are usually not high-end in the first place, so for light use both the MyDigitalSSD and Transcend drives should be fine.
All in all, MyDigitalSSD's Super Boot Drive gives Chromebook users an option to upgrade the internal storage for those who need it. I do not think the market is big, though, because you will have to live with the Chrome OS limitations, but someone who likes to carry around more than just a handful of HD movies might see the value in the upgrade. Long-term, it's also worth noting that Chrome OS sees regular updates, so it's entirely possible we'll see a future release add features and functionality that improve the offline storage experience. However, until that happens the benefits of upgrading the internal storage are pretty limited.
As far as the MyDigitalSSD Super Boot Drive goes, performance is on the low end of the spectrum. That comes from the constraints discussed above (i.e. the M.2 2242 form factor). It's still substantially faster than a typical hard drive, and the power characteristics are good as well, but there aren't many use cases for M.2 2242 right now – most laptops support the larger M.2 2260 and 2280 form factors, which can offer higher performance among other benefits, not to mention 2.5" drives. The MyDigitalSSD Super Boot Drive and Transcend MTS400 are pretty much it if you need a 2242 size SSD, but they're not price competitive with larger 2.5" SSDs so there are better options for most users.
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abianand - Thursday, October 23, 2014 - link
Thank you...very stupid of me posing a question without reading the article fully. First time I've done that.Spending around 75-80 for an ssd upgrade negatively affects the value proposition of the chromebook, which in the first place is questionable (to my purpose)
AnnonymousCoward - Thursday, October 23, 2014 - link
5 pages talk about performance, yet there's no inkling on actual user performance. You say "the performance difference is tremendous" - back that up with boot time or app launch time! Just looking at synthetics is idiotic.Realtime power consumption is less meaningful than total power consumed for some task. Faster transfer rates use more power while it's transferring but operate for less time.
cutterjohn - Saturday, November 1, 2014 - link
Also remember AMD is AWFUL wrt power usage.I recently bought a C720/i3/4GB version and replaced the shipped SSD w/128GB my digital -> ~100GB available. I suspect that part of the SSD space is walled of for OS reasons as there is a factory restore(in Android parlance) option which means a clean copy is stored somewhere, probably on it's own partition, and part of the space is probably also saved as misc space(I forget what they call it for SSDs, spare?).
Anyways ATM I've also croutonized it w/ xfce/Ubuntu 14.04, there's also croagh which supports more distros, e.g. ARCH, and chrubuntu which just replaces chrome os IIRC(wasn't ready to do that and probably won't*.)
* I used chrome os exclusively for a few days(waiting for SSD delivery) and it was quite fast and power efficient, regularly giving me ~8h of runtime. It was able to play netflix & amazon instant video OOB, but I haven't tried again since dev moding it and croutonizing it. (I've seen comments that dev mode removes netflix streaming capability, but they were old.)
Even with chroot Ubuntu/xfce it's pretty quick. A fair number of steam games are available for it, and I've just recently installed wine, but have not gotten around to trying out and windows apps/games yet although there are some videos of even skyrim(low settings although the videographer claims medium does OK as well) running on a celery chromebook.
Personally, I'd like an even smaller chromebook, more in the original netbook form factor, in which case 1280x720 or the existing 1366x768 would be quite dense although cramping the keyboard. I mainly picked it up for size and batt runtime as even my Sager 7330 is a bit bulky at times(13") and batt runtime is usually only ~3h. I also wouldn't have minded an i5 option as well and slotted RAM...
omegajimes - Tuesday, November 4, 2014 - link
Do people actually use Chromebooks with ChromeOS? I thought the only reason to pick these up were to load lightweight linux distros like Mint or Elementary on them.leoku - Wednesday, November 5, 2014 - link
I think the Commodore C64 all-in-one in the great grandpa's era is more fun than these netbooks and chromebooks, plus you can program it right out of the box. A Commodore C64 is more expensive than Chromebook nowadays, though.leoku - Wednesday, November 5, 2014 - link
Given the fact, I think the SSD upgrade for a Chromebook is a waste of money.dareo - Sunday, November 30, 2014 - link
I’ve just ordered a Lenovo S540 and it comes with a 1 TB HDD (5400 rpm) + a 16 GB M.2 SSD for caching. This leads to several questions related to the MyDigitalSSD 128GB Super Boot Drive:1. Could I swap out the 16 GB M.2 that comes with the Lenovo, replace it with the MyDigitalSSD 128GB Super Boot Drive, install the OS and apps on it and use it as the primary boot drive?
2. What’s the difference between the MyDigitalSSD 128GB Super Boot Drive and the MyDigitalSSD SC2 Super Cache 2 42mm SATA III 6G M.2 NGFF M2 SSD Solid State Drive?
3. How reliable is this M.2 SSD in comparison to a Crucial MX100 or a Samsung EVO?
4. Would it just make more sense to pluck the M.2 and HHD from the computer and install a 500 GB Crucial MX100 or a Samsung EVO?
Thanks in advance for any feedback / advice on this.