Any success with M720Q yet?

[marcojk]

Hi. I've had a go at this but no joy :( First board was a bit of a pain to solder but 2nd NVMe option showed up in bios; unfortunately the drive was not recognized, it just seemed to be slightly hotter than 1st drive.

Then I tried again on another board, checking everything twice, checked continuity for every joint. Same identical and sad results. I attached a scope and i saw a very different behaviour about pcie lines between white and black connector. Maybe the B360 chipset has no support for the second drive? What am I missing? Any suggestion appreciated

[marcojk]

Me being stubborn by nature, I've acquired a M920Q. Before doing any soldering i've scoped the pcie lanes on the unpopulated footprints C367-C374 and right off the bat the activity is totally different from those on M720Q; they are more active and dont do the 1VPP high signal and then off. Then, using components from the same batch, the same not-so-shaky hand, I've soldered all the stuff and... there you go, 2 NVMe drives recognized! So for M720Q I suppose changing the PCH strap resistors is not enough to enable dual nvme support.

[raenye]

i've scoped the pcie lanes

What bandwidth is required for this?

[marcojk]

Immense bandwidth and extremely expensive equipment, which both i don't have. But it's a qualitative test to see that they consistently do different things in the two configurations

[coflery]

hi all, as I know,m720q chipset is B360, it just support 1 nvme solt. but you can plug in SATA ssd at the new solt if you want.

in fact, m920q is really cheap on my aera, about just $50. so, I have succeed add 1 m2.sata + 1 m2.nvme on M920Q.

best wishes from china

[coflery]

[coflery]

[erustyrannus]

@marcojk According to @coflery you could add a sata driver there, not sure if you tried, I have 4 of the M720Q I might give it a go but since you already did I just wanted to check with you.

[marcojk]

According to the posted schematics, R1302 R1303 C373 C374 should be replaced with other components. I've a sata drive laying around somewhere I'll give it a go if i have some time.

[marcojk]

Still no luck. I was fooled by the b+m keyed SSD, i thought it was SATA but it is not. So i cannot test the new mod

[irisnotaprogrammer]

Tried this with a M720q on the 3rd and 4th of September 2023. It was complicated and way above my skill level in soldering, I have seriously underestimated it. We (me and my brother) used a heatgun to heat up the massive power planes sucking away heat, and some very fine desoldering lint along with A LOT of flux in order to clean the pads. Without a heating plate but with the heatgun the power planes were still very difficult to clean and to solder on.

My brother works in aviation instrument servicing (on component-level) so he isn't exactly afraid of SMD stuff, but did mention this would've seen the benefit of a microscope (which he uses at work) and checked the joints I made afterwards.

Little deviation from the original guide: I did not use 1% capacitors, they are all 10% tolerance, my brother was unable to find 1% ones at Mouser and believes the 1% listed in the guide might have been ones that do not actually exist. (His aviation-industry parts listings from work do not mention them, and they contain some of the most specialized parts ever).

I did succeed in the end however, second SSD (Sata, not PCIe, it came from a Pi4 with issues) is placed and recognized, and accessible in Linux, and shows up as M2. SATA drive in BIOS, with the M2 NVME slot option in the bios being empty because the SSD is obviously not a PCIe one. (Given the responses above it will be interesting to see what the difference could be between SATA and PCIe, I'm not sure what chipset I have).

Producttype tested: 10T7004BMH Processor type: Intel i5 8400T

After making the hardware adaptation, my M720q cycled through booting pre-BIOS 2-3 times, which was a nerve-wrecking 30 seconds with no image on the screen (and gave me the "Oh god, it failed!" feeling) after it showed the boot logo.

Make-shift solution to mount second SATA SSD, can't mount the cover plate for now (and wanted to have it open after placing the disk should there be smoke-signals)

The side with the most parts placed, spot the ones soldered at-home (most nervewracking solder-job I ever did, that's for sure).

Oh, a little hint: the cheaper generation NVME slots from the Mouser-link (and possibly the more expensive one as well) are ones that are NOT springloaded, so any SSD you mount, will drop to the PCB instantly. This might give you the idea you messed up the solderjob, but from what I was able to gather about this, the springloaded, up-angled loading is meant as a clear indicator that it's not fixed in place, to lower the amount of consumers calling Lenovo's (or other manufacturers) helpdesk. When I noticed this "drop-down" behavior I decided to unpack one of the remaining 2 slots (my brother bought 3 reasoning with the idea I could mess up 2) and put the SSD in that slot, only to notice it dropped down in that one as well, so all was good.

[marcojk]

Good job! And the soldering really doesn't look bad! So it is confirmed that B360 chipset of M720q supports 1 nvme slot + 1 sata slot.

FWIW, i had a couple for old laptop and i used their m.2 connectors, worked like a charm

[irisnotaprogrammer]

I personally do not require the massive speed increase of PCIe, my computer is plenty fast regardless, so that's not a big problem, but it is good to know. My m720q is used primarily for the lighter design requirements in Blender, along with the regular browsing and chatting, as a way to conserve energy and not have my big desktop run for that kind of thing, which now mostly handles gaming and the heavier Blender work like rendering and baking.

As for the soldering: it helps that my brother has very expensive soldering equipment, along with aviation-grade flux that is not allowed to be used at work anymore due to passing it's use-by-date requirements (if my brother learned anything from that job it's that they take safety in planes superserious and nothing is left to coincedence :P even more so than they already do in the car industry). He has a soldering iron with a tip that's about 1.5mm in size, so easier to work around the SATA flex connector with, and a very expensive pair of tweezers with a suuuuperfine tip.

I wonder by the way whether bandwidth is spread out over the WifiCard slot: I noticed that based on pinout for the NGFF standard it can fit SSD's, but that the types supported are limited and probably incredibly difficult to find as a result (and even then, might be a big gamble whether they work or not). The specification does allow reserving a lane for WWAN style cards, but mine is switched off since I do not use Wifi.

[badger707]

This is super cool progress & update! I was away from all of this for a while, but now have updated guide on m720Q part. @irisnotaprogrammer - thanks for callout on components tolerances - I checked my Mouser order and actually only resistors were 1%, caps 10%. I have removed that note in guide on this and added Mouser links to components summary table. @marcojk - saw your pull request, thanks, I have updated guide with a little bit more info and this gave merge conflicts.

[agottschling]

I hate to hijack this thread, but for an M720q, since it can only support a SATA ssd on the second port, would it be better to install a B key connector or a B+M key connector?

[irisnotaprogrammer]

I hate to hijack this thread, but for an M720q, since it can only support a SATA ssd on the second port, would it be better to install a B key connector or a B+M key connector?

You could do this. The main thing to remember is that not every manufacturer supports a fallback automatically. Some NVME supported disks can support both, and some chipsets do so as well, and some can only support NVME functionality even if the chipset would only provide SATA functionality. (a bit like how in the standard in which you usually see WiFi cards there are chipsets that allow a very small subset of storage devices in such a slot, and some computers explicitly except WiFi interface cards only).

An NVME disk in a SATA slot in which the disk can't switch back to SATA while the chipset might be capable will simply not be recognized.

For the people owning these adapted machines that's not the biggest problem: we know. If you at some point you might be intending selling them as adapted it could become a little more of a need to make it physically impossible to place an NVME disk. I would argue it's up to user discretion.

[Edit] It might cause a pinout change, I'm not sure if the different keyed slots lack pins in positions where the tutorial for modifying the board mentions soldering the connector to or placing the required capacitors... I would have to look up the datasheet for the NGFF style connectors of which Mini-PCIe is a part of.