Thinkpad 13 Gets NVMe Support With Three Jumpers

The Lenovo ThinkPad 13 comes with a puzzling hardware restriction: despite having an M.2 M-key socket, it only supports SATA SSDs, even though the CPU is perfectly capable of supporting both SATA and NVMe drives. When treble got their hands on one of these laptops from a recycler, they decided to investigate this limitation.

Armed with the schematics, they discovered that the M.2 slot was designed to handle both types of drives. However, Lenovo only populated the components needed for SATA support. To enable NVMe functionality, they identified a simple fix: adding three magnet wire jumpers or zero-ohm 0402 resistors. With this modification, the laptop could now use NVMe drives, which are faster and often cheaper than their SATA counterparts.

Moreover, treble noted that it’s possible to increase the PCIe link speed by soldering more PCIe lane capacitors, which were also left unpopulated. Additionally, the UEFI already contains the necessary modules to boot from NVMe drives, making this upgrade both practical and straightforward.

This mod opens up a path for users to unlock the full potential of their ThinkPad 13, bypassing Lenovo’s restrictive design choices and enabling faster, more affordable storage.

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