Defective kingston 24G SSD cache on ASUS Vivobook S550CM

Hello,

I am new to this forum, so please bear with me if I ask some noob questions.

I have a problem with my ASUS Vivobook S550CM. It takes to boot for a very long time (literally more than 5 minutes). But once I get inside windows 10 (I just upgraded last year) everything seems to be close to normal or a little laggy but still useable.

details:

Asus laptop comes with core i5, 6GB RAM, 2gb Nvidia dedicated graphics, 750GB HDD + 24GB SSD cache (Kingston SMSM150S3/24G)


I was able to diagnose and come to conclude that the problem lies in the 24GB SSD cache. When I tried to recover it back to Win 8 (original pre-installed OS) it can no longer see the recovery partition. Upon checking with utility software (belarc) I found out that the 24gb SSD cache disk already FAILED under SMART.

So i believe this is the culprit and immediately i searched online for 24GB SSD Kingston replacement and only found a used working item on ebay Kingston 24 GB SSD Laptop Solid State Drive SMSM150S3 24g | eBay

Now, my question is. When i get the item from ebay and install it on my ASUS laptop, Do i need to do something with the replacement 24GB SSD or i just swap it directly with the old defective SSD (by the way they have exactly the same brand and model).


Please advice as i have no idea on what to do.. I read somewhere that there has to be a set-up for IRST and etc... but i have little knowledge about it.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Ray

Any idea?

For now I just removed the defective 24GB SSD and it runs a little faster around 1minute boot up time.. It is good compared to more than 5 minutes on boot up with the defective SSD.

What I am concerned about is, will the replacement SSD need to be configured???? or it is the same as plug-and-play and everything will be back to normal... normally my laptop boots at 10-15seconds.