New era for storage: Chinese made laptop SSD tested in Lenovo laptop for the first time

For a long time, prices for NAND storage devices, also known as SSDs, have only known one direction: Downwards. SSDs used to be very expensive around fifteen years ago, and prices have steadily declined, making fast storage in pretty much all laptops a reality.

That was the case until the big AI bubble of 2026. With the market supply of RAM, SSDs and even HDDs being gobbled up by AI datacenters, memory prices have increased drastically, and so have laptop prices. Even big laptop OEMs are desperate for parts.

A better environment for new players in the storage market is hardly imagineable. And of course, it comes from China: Enter Yangtze Memory Technologies, also known as YMTC. Founded just ten years ago, this Chinese company has thus far been a almost complete unknown in the laptop SSD market, but things are in flux as the supply of SSDs by more established companies like Samsung or Kioxia is drying up.

We have now tested a YMTC drive in a Lenovo laptop for the first time. The Lenovo ThinkBook 14 G9 IPL we recently reviewed contains such a drive. The 512 GB M.2 2242 SSD is a NVMe PCIe 4.0 model. In our testing, its speed is below average for an SSD in an office laptop, with sequential read/write speeds topping out at 3950 or 2514 MB/s respectively. The 4K speed is also nothing to write home about.

Still: here is a Chinese SSD used the largest PC OEM by volume. It seems that 2026 is the year where YMTC SSDs have their final breakthrough into the mainstream.