m.2 cooling necessary?

[Billy Pilgrim]

I have noticed that some m.2 slots on motherboards have included thermal solutions. Do these drives actually get hot and do these heat sinks actually do anything?

[Jimkirk363]

@Billy Pilgrim Ive been asking this question on and off for about a year and get mixed results.  Some say yes and some say no.

[Snipergod87]

More often than not these "heatsinks" end up trapping heat from graphics cards and heating the SSD's, so they are mostly useless only for looks.

NAND is fine and performs better being hot, the controller though is the complete opposite.

Unless you are constantly writing and reading to the SSD hard all day long a heatsink that actually removes heat wont do anything as you wont hit throttle temps.

 

Samsung NVMe SSD's and some others actually have a super thin layer of copper on the sticker which is enough to deal with the heat for 99.9% of use cases.

[fabafaba]

41 minutes ago, Snipergod87 said:

More often than not these "heatsinks" end up trapping heat from graphics cards and heating the SSD's, so they are mostly useless only for looks.

NAND is fine and performs better being hot, the controller though is the complete opposite.

Unless you are constantly writing and reading to the SSD hard all day long a heatsink that actually removes heat wont do anything as you wont hit throttle temps.

 

Samsung NVMe SSD's and some others actually have a super thin layer of copper on the sticker which is enough to deal with the heat for 99.9% of use cases.

I've read about this copper thing some weeks ago, but I didn't feel like peeling the sticker of my Samsung SSD. However, now I'm kinda curious about the temps and HWinfo only gives one temperature and I don't know wher that is reading from. I'll go stick a thermalprobe on a few spots on my SSD and run a stresstest, I'll post the temps in half an hour or so.

 

EDIT: It'll take a little longer than half an hour, it already took me 15 minutes to get the probe on the SSD, when I post pictures you'll see what a pain in the ass it is to get it there.

[wONKEyeYEs]

40 minutes ago, Billy Pilgrim said:

some m.2 slots on motherboards have included thermal solutions

As @Snipergod87 said, the memory chips like it hot.

I saw a report concerning Samsung and how when they want to speed up aging of the chip they cool it.

Has to do with the electrons passing a barrier whose permeability increases with temp increase.

So when cooler the permeable barrier is damaged by the passage of the electrons. Can't site source.

And the controller likes it cool.

I have a Samsung 960 EVO with a heat sink from EK and I've been meaning to remove the thermal pad over the memory.

It never gets hotter than 30C to 40C, mostly closer to 30C.