Chinese YMTC SSDs make their way into retail Lenovo laptops — media outlet slams YMTC PCIe 4.0 drive for ‘below average for an SSD in an office laptop’ in review

As the memory and storage chip crisis continues to squeeze the market, some PC manufacturers began looking at alternative sources earlier this year just to meet consumer demand. Notebookcheck discovered in its review of the Lenovo ThinkBook 14 G9 IPL that it came with a 512GB YMTC M.2 NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD. What’s more interesting is that the laptop is readily available in the U.S., and you can order it on Amazon for $1,124.25 at the time of writing.

This is the first recorded instance that a laptop from a major OEM is being sold in the United States with a YMTC SSD, which is particularly curious given that the company was added to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Entity List in 2022. While this prevented the company from acquiring goods and services that were made with or contained American technologies, it does not prevent Lenovo, whose headquarters are in China, from importing such drives into the U.S.