Hardware restrictions can be unreasonable, and at times, it can be downright puzzling just how arbitrary they are. Such is the case with the Lenovo ThinkPad 13 — it’s got a M.2 M-key socket, yet somehow only supports SATA SSDs in it, despite the CPU being new enough to support both SATA and NVMe effortlessly. [treble] got one of those laptops from a recycler, and decided to figure out just what this laptop’s deal is.
Armed with schematics, she and her friend looked at the M.2 implementation. The slot’s schematic sure looked ready to support either kind of drive, a surprising find. Here’s the catch — Lenovo only populated components for SATA drive support. All you need to switch from SATA to NVMe support is three magnet wire jumpers, or zero-ohm 0402 resistors, and voila; you can now use the significantly cheaper kind of M.2 drives in your ThinkPad.
All is documented, and [treble] even mentions that you could increase the link speed by adding more PCIe lane capacitors that Lenovo, again, left unsoldered. UEFI already has the modules needed to boot from NVMe, too – it’s an outright upgrade for your laptop with just a soldering iron’s touch required, and a reminder that proprietary tech will screw you over for entirely arbitrary reasons. Now, it’s not just laptops you can upgrade with a few resistors — same goes for certain electric cars.
one of the coolest article this month.
OK, now this is a hack.
Hear, hear
Hackaday states “ UEFI already has the modules needed to boot from NVMe, too” but the source article says “though UEFI won’t let me boot from it”. Which is it?
It appears to be the latter, from what the linked page says. On the bright side, it’s relatively trivial to add the NVMe drivers to the UEFI firmware file — most implementations I’ve experimented with don’t even checksum the altered firmware properly, which is probably terrible for security, but great for those of us who want to get more out of our hardware.
But it booted after a fresh os install.
The source article has been updated:
Update 30/09/2024: Booting from NVMe actually works, my initial mistake was not performing a clean install through the laptop
I think the 0ohm resistors should be 100nF capacitors.
I forgot about “0 ohm” resistors, this article just saved me 2 components.
Hi, i made the writeup about this hack and the 0 ohm resistors (i believe you mean the bridging that’s done in the picture) is supposed to replace the two capacitors that were previously present.
This reminds me of the delightful surprise I got with a T14 (AMD) when I looked into swapping in a higher resolution panel I had from a T490.
On the AMD T14s they leave the capacitors for half the eDP lanes unpopulated; while they are fully populated on the Intel based T14s. iGPU supports 4 lanes without trouble; and it’s a 40 pin connector in both cases; but they just had to spitefully break compatibility with higher resolution panels over what must be pennies worth of SMT capacitors.
Glad to see that people were able to get the situation rectified in this case.
Cynical me thinks it’s Intel pressuring Lenovo like in the old days, or Lenovo itself artificially segmenting the market– if the AMD T14s had WQHD, no one would buy the Intel variant.
It was definitely a segmentation play: despite the display assemblies being identical across the T490 and gen1 and gen 2 T14s(aside from the different model name stenciled on the bezel between the T490 and 14); the AMD T14s were not configurable with higher resolution panels.
I’d be a little curious to know what the backstory was just because the crippling was so petty but so incomplete: they deliberately omitted a pittance worth of SMT caps; but still went to the trouble of routing all 4 lanes from the CPU package right up to the eDP connector; left the unpopulated pads in place, went with the 40-pin connector that supports 4-lane operation, etc.
Not sure if they made the decision to enforce segmentation in hardware fairly late in the game; if they expected that things might change before they did a motherboard revision; or if the one-time cost of routing those traces wasn’t a big deal but they actually saved money on all the capacitors they didn’t ship.
Lenovo likes to disable you from doing other things they don’t need to, like putting a short ssd in the wwan / wifi slot – well actually they don’t allow any non-recognized device id. Shame, because a lot of times their stuff is decent.
Wonder which is worse: Requiring only pennies worth of components but also microsoldering for nvme support, or requiring ~$50 worth but you only have to plug in a cable (the case with my X260).
I think the 13 here is even the same year as my X260.
This is so cool not only because they discovered this and tested it and it works, but also because now I can grab a soldering iron, go to town on my mainboard and impress the hell out of my nerd friends (yes I know this don’t make me Louis Rossman) :-D
Really cool hack.
Well, well, well. I’ve just replaced in 17 identic (same model number) HP notebooks (serial numbers are different only in the last character) the old 128G SSD and a 1TB failing HDD with a 1TB SSD, but some were booting only from M2 SATA (even I could read the disk while booting from portable linux) and the others from M2 NVMe. Obviously there was no order in this mess. I did not reinstall windblows as I was dd-ing like crazy the C: drive. I’ll see, if one if the SATA notebooks becomes available, if a NVMe SSD will be accepted while installing previously named OS from scratch. Any suggestions? 10x in advance.