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Has anyone tried upgrading a ThinkPad T480 with an NVMe Gen4 SSD?
Posted: Sun Sep 07, 2025 9:31 pm
by Arielbr
Hi everyone, I’m using a ThinkPad T480 and I’m considering replacing the old SSD with a Gen4 NVMe drive to boost performance. I know the laptop only supports PCIe 3.0, but I’m not sure if a Gen4 SSD would still run stably at Gen3 speeds. Has anyone here tried this upgrade before? I’d love to hear your real-world experiences before buying a new drive.
Re: Has anyone tried upgrading a ThinkPad T480 with an NVMe Gen4 SSD?
Posted: Mon Sep 08, 2025 4:29 am
by axur-delmeria
This guy on reddit installed a Crucial T500 2TB (Gen4 NVMe SSD) without issues (except for not realizing that the old SSD has the operating system and the new one is blank)
https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comme ... _stuck_on/.
From a technical standpoint there shouldn't be any issues with any Gen 4 NVMe, because they are designed to be backward-compatible with PCIe 3.0, heck even PCIe 2.0. The real limitation with the T480 is that only two PCIe lanes are connected to the NVMe slot (instead of 4 lanes), so unless your current SSD is low-budget one that can't saturate a PCIe 3.0x2 link, you won't find much improvement in terms of read/write speeds.
Re: Has anyone tried upgrading a ThinkPad T480 with an NVMe Gen4 SSD?
Posted: Mon Sep 08, 2025 8:00 pm
by Arielbr
axur-delmeria wrote: ↑Mon Sep 08, 2025 4:29 am
This guy on reddit installed a Crucial T500 2TB (Gen4 NVMe SSD) without issues (except for not realizing that the old SSD has the operating system and the new one is blank)
https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comme ... _stuck_on/.
From a technical standpoint there shouldn't be any issues with any Gen 4 NVMe, because they are designed to be backward-compatible with PCIe 3.0, heck even PCIe 2.0. The real limitation with the T480 is that only two PCIe lanes are connected to the NVMe slot (instead of 4 lanes), so unless your current SSD is low-budget one that can't saturate a PCIe 3.0x2 link, you won't find much improvement in terms of read/write speeds.
Thanks, axur-delmeria. I decided to upgrade the SSD for the T480.