WHY IT MATTERS: Chinese-made solid-state drives are starting to show up in everyday business laptops, and Lenovo is one of the first big PC makers to put one of them in a widely sold model. The company's ThinkBook 14 G9 IPL now ships in at least one configuration with an SSD from Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC), a major Chinese NAND flash supplier.
Notebookcheck says this is the first YMTC laptop SSD it has tested and reports that the ThinkBook uses a 512GB M.2 2242 PCIe 4.0 drive, according to its teardown and performance testing. The ThinkBook 14 G9 IPL is a 14-inch office notebook built around Intel Core Ultra 200-series processors. It targets office and productivity use rather than gaming, so its storage setup usually doesn't draw much attention.
What stands out here is the source of the NAND. YMTC is one of China's main NAND flash suppliers, and its SSD turning up in a Lenovo business notebook shows that Chinese-made storage is starting to appear alongside Samsung, Kioxia, and Western Digital drives in mainstream systems.
On paper, the YMTC drive looks like a modern PCIe 4.0 client SSD. In testing, though, Notebookcheck found that it runs slower than most SSDs it has measured in office laptops.
