Which SSD for my Acer Nitro 5 Ryzen 5 Laptop (Nitro AN515-42)?

My answers.

1. You should be able to replace the 1TB HDD with a SSD as long as the footprint is the same.

2. That depends on the partition type -and- the footprint of the drive.
If it's Windows 10, it should be able to support GPT partitions, which can be pretty large.

3. Yes.

4. Dunno. As long as the footprint is the same, then it should be okay.

5. You'll have to look inside and see if there's a NVME port inside the laptop.

6. Does the drive fit inside the laptop? A GPT partition would allow Windows 10 to access it.

7. Dunno. Maya is fairly computation intensive. More RAM will help, as well as the fastest CPU you can get.

FWIW...

 

go to manufacturer's website and look up the specs. easy.

go to maya website and look up min. system requirements. easy.

 

You need to login to view this posts content.

 

Don't know if I can answer your questions specifically, but I bought an Acer Aspire 7 recently and here's my experience with SSD for what it's worth.

The laptop came with a Micron m2 drive, only sata performance out of it, about 500mbs sequential read. Changed it out with an Intel 760p. Switched EFI to AHCI mode and using Intel NVMe drivers. Had to completely remove the bottom cover to get to it, no access panel, probably voided the warranty doing that, but tfb. Getting expected results on Crystal Disk, benchmarks around 2500 mbs sequential read. NVMe drives are amazing.

The laptop came with a 1tb mechanical as well as the m2 ssd. Removed the mechanical and replaced with an Intel 545s ssd. Working well, getting expected benchmarks for sata 6gb.

I initally tried a SanDisk SSD in the sata bay and had all kinds of problems, filesystem corruption, tried more than one. New rule for me, avoid SanDisk ssd.

One note, I've read there's 512gb limit on the m2 drive so if yours has the m2 slot, which it probably does, check on that. Also check it's NVMe capable. Only the m2 slot can support NVMe, you can't get those speeds with anything in the drive bay since it's limited to sata 6gb.

 

if it was under warranty u should have send back to ACER with the SSD of your choice and let install it for u and u dont void the warranty.

 

If your Nitro 5 has an m2 slot but does not support NVMe there's no reason to use it, no speed advantage to be had. In that case the only reason to use it is if you want two drives.

The drive bay and memory panels are there for user access so changing out the drive in the bay should not void the warranty, though check on that.

In terms of sata I've used a Samsung 860 EVO and Intel 545s on my Aspire 7 with good results. The Samsung is on a sata->usb3 converter, Intel drive is in the bay.

 

I use Cinema 4D which I think is fairly similar to Maya. Maxon have a free program called Cinebench that does a test C4D render, then you can compare your CB score with other people's scores - there's tons of websites with CB scores. It will give an indication of Maya render performance.

If your laptop scores say 700 when you bench it, and a pc from one of the charts gets say 1400, then your machine would take 2X as long to render any scene (on Maya) compared to the 1400 one. This is a cpu test - nowadays the trend is for gpu rendering.

Rendering is very hard on cpus (ie 100% for hours), so cooling is important. Keeping a tower pc free of fluff etc is easy compared to a laptop.

If Maya supports it, you might want to consider building a little render farm of 1 or more headless (higher spec than the laptop) boxes. I have a collection of rather old i7 render nodes, and it's a case of 6 boxes = 1/6 of the render time. Some 3D folk use commercial render farms - you upload your scene, and a movie comes back, for a price.