Thinkpads Forum

I have just purchased an X270 after using a T440s for the last three years. The X270 is arriving with no drive and my T440s has both a 500GB SSD (used as download, scratch, and storage) and a 256GB m.2 SSD which is the boot drive. Is it possible to simply remove the m.2 boot drive from the T440s, install into the X270, and let Windows 10 find the new hardware and install the proper drivers, or would it be more advisable to just start fresh?

Searching online I have found several discussions about doing this with desktop hardware and it seemed to work OK so I assume it might work, but I have learned so much from reading the posts on this forum as I have moved from years (decades) of using Macs to the world of ThinkPads I thought I would ask for advise before proceeding.

Planning to run Linux on the T440s but haven't decided on which distro.

An M.2 SATA drive will fit/work in the X270 WWAN slot.
Can W10 (re)use it? No idea, just try it.
Either way, a fresh install is always better.

Lot's of architecture changes. Skylake vs Haswell, DDR4 vs DDR3. I would be surprised if it worked out of the box. Clean install recommended with restore from backup afterwards.

i've tried m2 ssd from TEAM on m2 wwan slot at x270, no success. even it won't boot, ask if there's a whitelist for such card.

if your boot drive is formatted in GPT (not MBR), you should be able to move the installation between computers.
i've done it couple times with different drives.
last time i did it with win10 installation on GPT formatted SSD that installed in t470, and move it to dell optiplex 7040.
It will boot on the dell computer, but the drivers will be limited to what's available on the disk. Need to connect to internet and performing windows update for driver installation.
the activation also automatic, perhaps because previous windows instllation in that dell computer already activated.

I think you will be lucky and it will boot albeit slowly the first time. If not then no harm will be done as you can just put it back where it was. You might have trouble with activation . Just in case - a disk image would be a sensible precaution.
I regularly put a T60 SSD in a T530 and it boots up happily and after use it goes back in the T60. Win 10 is very good in this respect.