Whenever an industry finds itself amid a supply shortage, prices are the first thing to rise, and interesting alternatives to everyday products are usually the next to appear. The PC storage market seems to have produced its own example. In a recent review of the Lenovo ThinkBook 14 G9 IPL, Notebookcheck found a 512GB NVMe drive from YMTC, which is a known Chinese NAND manufacturer.

Now, the drive works as intended, but its performance is rated slightly below average for an office laptop. The detail that matters for most consumers, though, is the fact that the same laptop can now ship with entirely different storage depending on region and configuration, and it's not very easy to tell them apart from raw specs alone. Whether this pattern becomes the norm for laptops globally is naturally the bigger question, but the more immediate and pressing question is whether you would know if your laptop shipped with the right SSD for the right price.

What do we know about the YMTC SSDs?

Chinese components continue to substitute familiar products

Notebookcheck's July 1 review of the Lenovo ThinkBook 14 G9 IPL revealed a 512GB M.2 2242 NVMe PCIe 4.0 drive from YMTC, short for Yangtze Memory Technologies, marking the first time the outlet had tested a Chinese-manufactured SSD inside a laptop from a major global OEM. The drive posted sequential read and write speeds of 3950 and 2514 MB/s respectively, which the reviewers rated "below average" for the laptop, albeit still comfortable for every day use-cases.

This obviously raised questions that Lenovo was quick to address. On July 9, Lenovo responded to a query raised by Tom's Hardware stating that it did not use YMTC SSDs in products configured and shipped to the US market, however, the OEM noted that the review unit happened to be a German SKU. If you read between the lines, you'll notice that the very same SKU now ships with different storage suppliers depending on where you buy it from, and nothing on the product page will tell you which configuration you'd be getting.

This practice seems to be an emergent pattern in the consumer technology markets across the globe. A month ago, Tom's Hardware reported that Corsair DDR5 kits had surfaced carrying Chinese CXMT memory for non-US markets, and more recently, Apple was seen lobbying Washington for permission to buy CXMT chips outright. In such a paradigm, YMTC's debut in Lenovo's laptop lineup doesn't feel like a complete anomaly, but rather just another symptom of the storage market's supply crunch manifesting itself through more patterns.

How far behind are the YMTC drives, really?

Wobblier and more unstable under pressure

The Notebookcheck review's data delves deeper into the performance aspect. On sequential transfers (that determine how fast data transfer rates are on an SSD) the drive posts about 3950 MB/s reads and 2514 MB/s writes, which are reasonable numbers for a PCIe 4.0 drive. However, when it comes to 4K random reads (the aspect that determines how "snappy" a laptop feels), the drive manages about 44.7 MB/s and lands 26% behind the office class average, putting it firmly behind both Micron and WD drives.

The drive does not seem to be as reliable under sustained loads either. In a looped read test, the reviewers noted that the drive's throughput repeatedly collapsed from 4,400 MB/s to under 2,000 MB/s before recovering, which is associated with thermal or cache throttling. Now, to be fair, this pattern of behavior will not be evident in the use cases the laptop is designed for, such as running Microsoft Office or browsing. However, it does imply that the substitution isn't completely invisible.

Shrinkflation has found its way into the storage market

Same prices, slightly worse performance

There is a name for what's happening here. "Shrinkflation" is a common economic term associated with getting less value, quantity or performance out of a good or service while the price holds. That seems like a phenomenon which can now be observed in the storage market.

If you go over to the OEM's product page now, you'll find that, with the same SKU, you'd get a "512GB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD", but it doesn't give you any information about the supplier, the controller, or the NAND inside. The issue with this practice is the fact that it deliberately attempts to withhold information from the buyers that can otherwise act as variables that influence the purchase at the checkout counter or even while looking for alternatives.

To be fair, this kind of component swapping predates the existing PC hardware pricing crisis. Most enthusiasts would remember drive makers substituting slower NAND and controllers into well-reviewed SSDs years ago, and this practice earned its infamy precisely because benchmarks across the same SKUs weren't quite consistent with the others, despite having the same model numbers. The shortage seems to have industrialized this habit and pushed it further upstream, from retail drives to the laptops they ship inside, where the scrutiny is thinner and return rates are low.

Please do your due diligence before buying from an OEM, especially now

There's no way to avoid buying OEM laptops, of course. What is important, however, is to review what you're buying before you spend. It's generally good practice to dig into the review coverage for your exact SKU, understand the trade-offs you might be making, and then make a decision on whether those trade-offs make a purchase worth it. It's crucial now more than ever, especially given that component pricing is forcing manufacturers and OEMs to undertake measures they otherwise wouldn't have, and the spec sheets cannot be relied on to tell you the whole story.