Lenovo Y700 M.2 Slot

Lenovo Y700 M.2 Slot 7,9/10 8478 votes

By installing a M.2 drive in your Lenovo Y700 laptop you’ll get a significantly faster laptop and have 2 drives. This article will show you what you need to get and how to install the correct M.2 drive. The laptop that is being upgraded is a Lenovo Y700-14ISK.

The video below will give you an overview of the entire process.

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The Type Of M.2 Drive You’ll Need

The notebook has one 2.5-inch slot, which is taken by an HDD manufactured by WD with 1TB capacity and 5400 rpm speed. Near the battery, you will find the M.2 SSD slot that supports 2280 sticks with using the PCIe NVMe controller for ultra-fast data transfer and read speeds.

The Lenovo Y700 needs a M.2 drive with a SSD interface. This means you’ll want to purchase something like the Samsung 850 EVO 500 GB M.2 drive. I installed the 256GB version and already wish I had spent the extra bit and gone with the 512GB version.

Hello I have a Lenovo y700 with two 4gb sticks of 2133 mhz ram. Is it possible to just buy one 8gb stick and put it in there with no issues? Hello Is my laptop from the port m.2 for ssd support (lenovo y50-70) But the Lenovo y50 laptop does not have a m.2 slot for a m.2 SSD. At reading random small files - about 25-35 MB/s and 70k-100k IOPS. All the RAM Memory, SSDs and accessories needed to upgrade your Lenovo notebook, desktop or workstation. Utilise the dropdown boxes to find the correct RAM memory and SSD upgrades for your Lenovo B, C, E, G, H, V, Z series notebook, Lenovo H and S series desktop, IdeaCentre, IdeaPad, ThinkCentre, Thinkpad, ThinkServer, ThinkStation, Yoga and X1.

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Samsung M.2 SATA SSD Drive

You might ask if you can install the Samsung 950 series M.2 drive. The answer is no. The 950 has a PCIe 3.0 interface that will work as a 2nd drive in Windows 10 but you will not be able to boot from it no matter how you tweak the current BIOS. I know this because I made this mistake originally.

If you’re really interested in the differences in SSD hard drives and PCIe vs SATA the following two videos are a good overview

Understanding the different SSD drives out there in this ASUS SSD overview.

PCIe vs SATA SSD

So just to recap, you need to purchase a M.2 Drive with a SSD interface like the Samsung 850 EVO 500 GB M.2 drive.

Tools And Equipment For Installation

You will need the following for the installation process:

There is no screw to hold down the M.2 drive so you’ll need a M2x3. I didn’t have one laying around so I ended up getting a laptop screws set just in case I needed some extra screws for another project.

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Opening The Case

Make sure the laptop is powered off (not sleeping) and unplugged.

Flip the laptop over face down. You might want to do this on a surface that won’t scratch the top of the laptop. There are 10 screws that you need to unscrew. All of them are the same length except the center one is a little longer. Also, you need to unscrew the ones at the front at an angle.

Lenovo Y700 Screw Location

Taking off the back of the laptop case is a little weird. First, separate the Y700 case at the front.

Next, you’re going to lift the front slightly and push back on the lifted section. I tried to provide you with two points of view for this procedure in the video at the top.

Lift Up Y700 Case First To Open

Installing The Y700 M.2 Drive

The drive will go in only one way. If you’re using a Samsung 850 drive the sticker will be face up.

Put the drive in at a 45 degree angle and push it forward to seat it.

Putting The Drive In Place

Press the drive down in place

And secure it with the M2x3 screw.

Closing the Y700 Case

For closing the case I found the easiest way was to slide the bottom back on. Then put the laptop on it’s nose and press forward. This will snap the area around the speakers in place.

From there you will snap the rest of the case in place and put the screws back in. Remember the long screw is the one in the center.

Initializing The M.2 Drive

Your new hard drive will need to be initialized. To get to disk management in Windows 10 you will

Initializing The Drive In Disk Management

You’ll probably get a popup saying you need to initialize a disk

Make sure GPT is chosen and click ok (What is GPT?)

Copying The Old Files To The New Drive

Since we’re using a Samsung drive we’ll use the Samsung drive copy utility to copy over the files from the original drive to the new one.

Go to the Samsung SSD site
Download and install the Samsung Data Migration Software
Start the Program

Just follow the instructions and let the program copy the files over. At the end you’ll be asked to click OK to shutdown the laptop. Go ahead and do that.

What will happen, is in addition to copying the files it sets the new Samsung drive as the primary drive to boot from by disabling the original drive.

Formatting The Second Drive So You Can Use It

Let’s see how you can turn that original 1TB drive into a second drive in your laptop. Go back into Disk Management by

Once you’re in there, the original drive will be Offline.

From there you’ll select partition you don’t want anymore,

You’ll notice there are certain partitions marked recovery that you won’t be able to delete this way. To get rid of these you’ll need to use DISKPART. There is a quick video below showing you how to use DISKPART in Windows 10.

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After you’ve gotten rid of the partitions you want to,

From there you’ve got yourself a second drive on your laptop.

Hope you found this helpful. Just a reminder this is the hardware and software you’ll use to do this installation:

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Posted on 5th Sep 2016 11:24:42 in SSD, NVMe, Laptops

Y700 NVMe SSD Performance

After discovering less than expected performance from the 950 Pro in the Lenovo Y700, looking deeper as to what is going on at a platform level. With Skylake CPU's have DMI 3.0 x4 for communicating with the 100 Series PCH their should be no reason the full bandwidth should be available to be utilized when a PCIe 3.0 x4 SSD is installed in the laptop. In reality what is seen is the performance capped at PCIe 2.0 speeds of ~1600MB/s

Skylake CPU – PCH(-LP) Communication Link Characteristics
Aspect	DMI 3.0
Applicable Systems	Skylake-H/-S/-K
Link Width	x4
Transfer Rate per Lane	8 GT/s
Max. Theoretical Bandwidth	3.94 GBps

For all practical purposes, DMI 3.0 and PCIe 3.0 are equivalent, and this is important when a PCIe 3.0 x4 SSD is connected to the a Skylake-H/-S/-K system using PCIe lanes from the PCH. Any other peripheral communicating with the CPU at the same time as the PCIe SSD would end up creating a bottleneck at the CPU-PCH link.

Samsung 950 Pro

The Samsung 950 Pro 256GB used in this test is capable of 2200MB/s is a PCIe 3.0 x 4 design.

Installed in the Lenovo Y700 M.2 slot we can see that electrically it is reported as connecting at x4 and 10Gbps to the PCH (Intel 100 Series), perfect this is what we want so why are we only able to get 1600MB/s read out of a device capable of 2200MB/s.

Skylake Platform

The CPU connects to the PCH via DMI 3.0 x 4 wide link, this link is a 40Gbps link and as above the M.2 Slot is also 40Gbps, It is obvious their is a bottleneck between the CPU and the PCH.

I suspect that the upstream DMI link is set to connect at only DMI 2.0 speeds or is set to only 2 lanes. Only Lenovo will know as the setting is not exposed in the BIOS or able to be queried by any software I have found.

Taking the block diagram for the platform the Skylake CPU communicates with the PCH via the DMI 3.0 link, This is where it looks like their is a bottleneck, similar to the OPI link in the Skylake Intel NUC's that were configured to half speed to save power. Intel later released a BIOS update to unlock the PCIe NVMe SSD performance.

Test Platform

Y700 ISK15

Samsung 950 Pro 256GB

Lenovo Y700 M.2 Ssd Compatibility

Intel I7 6700HQ (DMI 3.0 x 4)

Intel 100 Series PCH (DMI 3.0 x 4)

How to fix this?

Unfortunately only Lenovo can provide a new BIOS that allows the DMI interface to run at full speed. I can understand why they have configured it to half speed as none of their shipping configurations require more than 1600MB/s throughput. Setting the DMI link to 2.0 speeds also would save them on power usage, extending battery life. My laptop spends most if its time plugged into the wall so i would rather have the link operate at full speed. I have asked Lenovo to comment and will update when I receive an answer.

Links

Update:

Response from Lenovo was initially encouraging that Engineering where going to look into it, however i received this reply that is less encouraging.

With regards to the issue reported, we have not received any updates from Engineering team and I checked with my supervisor on the issue and was advise we cant be certain when the new BIOS update will be available and what changes will be made as BIOS updates are rolled out based on need and specific to a customer's preference and since this is in regards to a 3rd party hardware, it is highly unlikely.

Ideapad Y700 M 2 Ssd

You can monitor our support website for when the next BIOS update will be available.
Should you have any further inquiries please contact us.

Update #2

This has been confirmed that the DMI link is set to Gen 2 speeds from de-compiling the BIOS, From the Hidden Advanced menu in the BIOS you can clearly see the DMI link speed settings.

Lenovo Y700 M.2 Slot Computer

0x782F5 Setting: DMI Max Link Speed, Variable: 0xC10 {05 91 69 0E 6A 0E 44 07 34 12 10 0C 10 10 00 03 00}
0x78306 Option: Auto, Value: 0x0 {09 07 C3 0B 00 00 00}
0x7830D Option: Gen1, Value: 0x1 {09 07 2F 03 00 00 01}
0x78314 Option: Gen2, Value: 0x2 {09 07 30 03 30 00 02}
0x7831B Option: Gen3, Value: 0x3 {09 07 31 03 00 00 03}
0x78322 End of Options {29 02}
I confirmed it is set to Gen2 0x2 by reading the Variable 0xC10 from an EFI Shell, unfortunately it appears to be a signed variable so without the right utility I couldn't change it.

Why Lenovo engineers simply wont change what is easily accessible via the Hidden Advanced Menu in the BIOS is reason enough to look elsewhere for a laptop.

UPDATE! SUCCESS!!

Steps to unlock to follow.