Lenovo Thinkpad Carbon X1 (3rd Gen) 1TB possible?

[jass56]

Hello everybody,

is there anybody that has upgraded his 3rd Gen X1 Carbon to a 1TB ssd? I'm running out of place and would like to have a bigger ssd and do not know which one I could use. I tried reading in the forums, but was not able to find out which SSD would work. Somehow NVMe is not supported, it has to be a PCIe SSD (I think), but I'm not too familiar with these things. I looked at the new Samsung SM961 1TB that is just coming out, would that be able to work?

The specs are here: 

https://gzhls.at/blob/ldb/c/4/4/9/618ff48c1c0dc799c9442fd598fa06935527.pdf

Any help would be deeply appreciated.

Regards,

Jochen

[TripleX1]

Easiest would be the SATA M.2 SSDs, quite a few 1TB options.

If you want M.2 PCIe/AHCI SSD - there are fewer options and I have not seen 1TB. (SM951, Kingston HyperX seem to stop at 512)

If Lenovo were to bother to add NVMe module in the BIOS you could use any of the new PCIe/NVMe SSDs but that's not likely to happen. On desktop BIOSes plenty people just added the UEFI NVMe module to older boards but I have not seen any X1 Gen3 modded BIOSes yet.

I don't think either SM961 or PM961 will boot - they could work as 2nd drives if you can boot off something else.

[jass56 · Accepted solution]

Hello,

I tried to contact Lenovo 4 weeks ago to ask about a possible BIOS update for NVME support, so far the only answer was that it is not possible to use a SSD larger than 500GB. I guess they are trying to sell the Gen4 and have no interest to update the old BIOS.

I found a 960GB SSD though with AHCI that works fine with the X1 carbon 3rd GEN:

https://geizhals.de/kingston-hyperx-predator-960gb-shpm2280p2h-960g-a1495637.html

I just switched it with the Samsung SM951, did a fresh install of Windows 10, everything (including boot) is working fine.

At least my space problem is solved in the moment, although the price for the SSD is quite high.

Regards,

Jochen

[jass56]

Edit: in order to keep all my programs etc. I cloned the old SSD to the new one. Everything including boot was working fine. See also my other post:

https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-X-Series-Laptops/Found-a-960GB-SSD-with-AHCI-for-X1-Carbon-3rd...

jass56