Last time I mentioned wanting to upgrade the 512GB SSD on this machine, and after a super long wait, the new drive finally arrived! Since I haven’t bought the extended warranty yet, I decided not to do a deep teardown to repaste the CPU just to play it safe. I’ll wait a year or two until the stock thermal paste completely gives out 😂.
I happened to have some free time the past couple of days, so I swapped the SSD and got the OS and all my software installed. I’m actually typing this blog post on the X1 Carbon right now.
One thing to keep in mind: before opening it up, it’s best to disable the battery in the BIOS first. Hit F1 on boot to enter the BIOS setup, head over to Config > Power, find “Disable Built-in Battery”, and press Enter to power off the machine completely. After that, the laptop won’t respond to the power button at all until you plug the charger back in, and power to the motherboard is completely cut off. Of course, just to be on the safe side, I still physically removed the battery after popping off the back cover.
All it takes is loosening the 5 screws on the bottom and gently prying from the top edge to pop the back cover off. Just be careful with the clips along the top and bottom edges so you don’t snap them. Once the bottom cover is off, you can see the internal layout is pretty clean. You just unscrew the 8 screws holding the battery in place and gently lift it out. You don’t even have to mess with any ribbon cables to take the battery out, which is a huge plus.
The SSD comes covered with a factory heatsink shield, which is great to see. Underneath the shield, there’s a pre-applied thermal pad that does a solid job of pulling heat away.
Once you take off the thermal shield, you get a full view of the stock SSD. It’s an OEM Samsung drive with only 256 GB of storage. Because of the small capacity, the read and write speeds are pretty meh.
And here is the star of today’s upgrade: the Solidigm P44 Pro.
Finally, I put the battery back in and screwed the bottom cover back on. When you plug in the power adapter and boot it up, it’ll tell you no boot drive is found. That’s when you plug in the factory recovery USB drive you prepped ahead of time, and it’ll automatically reinstall the whole system for you. The whole process took over 2 hours, which was painfully slow.
Now that the OS is up and running, it’s time to test if the SSD actually hits the expected speeds. Checking Solidigm’s official Synergy Toolkit, the drive idles around 44°C during normal use, which is totally normal.
And of course, we have to run some benchmarks! 7000 MB/s read and 5000 MB/s write—that’s top-tier performance for a PCIe 4.0 SSD.
Honestly, you don’t really feel a massive difference in day-to-day use. The main reason I swapped the SSD myself is because Lenovo charges an arm and a leg ($286!) just to upgrade to 512 GB on their configurator. Meanwhile, I snagged this drive on sale for under $100 after tax and shipping—unbeatable bang for the buck. Wrapping this up, I have to say, the ThinkPad keyboard feels incredible—miles ahead of my old MacBook Pro! That wraps up my ThinkPad tinkering for now; time to get back to grinding LeetCode and prepping for interviews. The job market is rough out there right now.