ASUS

The PA40SU is a handsome, mostly metal black rectangle measuring approximately 4.75 inches long, by 1.8 inches wide, by 0.6 inches thick. Weight is around 4.7 ounces with an SSD inside. It’s svelte indeed for a 40Gbps SSD enclosure — witness the large fins and bulk of the competing OWC 1M2 and TerraMaster D1 Plus. The enclosure is slotted on both sides to facilitate air flow, and is actively cooled by a fan at the non-port end. The fan is the reason it’s not as bulky as the aforementioned competition. The NVMe bridge/controller chip is an ASMedia ASM2464PD, and no AC adapter is required — the

The PA40SU was retailing on Amazon for $120 at the time of this writing. That’s roughly the going rate for a 40Gbps enclosure at the moment, though some that have been around longer might offer better discounts. Alas, the one-year warranty is a bit disappointing. I was expecting at least two years at this price point.

I like the looks, I like the performance, and I like how easy it is to install an NVMe SSD in the PA40SU. I’d prefer that it run a bit cooler, but it’s still a worthy product. Go for it, but as always — shop carefully to get the best bang for your buck.

As stated earlier, this configuration of the ASUS Vivobook 14 is armed with an Intel Core 5 120U (10 Cores) processor, 16GB RAM (which is getting harder to come by thanks to this RAM Crisis), and a 1TB SSD. With the first two specs in tandem, this laptop will have no trouble multitasking professional apps like Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop or opening up dozens upon dozens of internet browser tabs without suffering performance slowdowns. Its 1TB SSD is able to help the ASUS Vivobook 14 boot itself in mere seconds, and grant the user plenty of space to store precious data files, whether th