CPU Tower-Style Cooler for M.2 SSDs Can Reduce Temps by over 50%

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JiuShark has announced the M.2-Three, a new M.2 SSD cooler that the Chinese PC components manufacturer claims can reduce temperatures by over 50%.

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50% compared to...

Also, it's quite large, not gonna work with every setup.
 
50% compared to no cooler presumably.

But why? It won't make it faster or better.
 
Look at the size of that thing. And what does it realistically provide? Lower temps sure, but does that matter any? Not like nvme's were holding back the turbo boost bc of temp levels?
 
As I recall, some parts of NVMe drives - like QLC flash chips - actually need to run a bit warmer.

Thing is, there's not really a standard for any of this, and many motherboards come with 'heatsinks' that hide and provide some cooling to M.2 drives already. And then you have massive GPUs that make accessing M.2 drives as they are difficult, let alone would prevent the installation of one of these tower heatsinks in most viable M.2 locations.
 
I don't doubt that they can.

Adding a cooler usually has that effect.

Too bad there is usually a GPU in the way.

Also, is m.2 temperature really a problem?

I have three m.2 drives in my system, a Samsung 980 Pro, a Sabrent Rocket 4.0 and a Samsung 970 EVO, and I've never seen any of them even get close to their critical temperature thresholds.

Idle Temp (C)Warning Temp (C)Critical Temp (C)
Samsung 980 Pro 2TB498285
Sabrent Rocket 4.0 (Phison E16) 2TB469095
Samsung 970 EVO368585

I don't know what the temp looks like under load, but according to SMART data none of them have ever spent any time exceeding either Warning or Critical temps. I can't tell if they have ever thermal throttled though.

I'd do a load test, but I'm not sure what a good one would be. Suggestions?

The 980 Pro and the Sabrent Rocket are both installed under the motherboards included heatsink/heat spreader. I made sure I had good contact with the thermal pads so that the heat is transferred to the heat spreader.

The 970 Evo is installed in an m.2 slot on the back of the motherboard. When I installed it, I made sure I added a thick enough thermal tape that it made contact with the motherboard tray, to help pull off any heat. It is unclear how much of the lower temp of the 970 Evo is due to this, and how much of it is due to the fact that it is an older Gen 3 design, compared to the other being Gen 4.

1657053815426.png

Either way, with current m.2 drives temperatures just don't seem to be a huge problem, unless maybe you have very poor airflow in your case, or if you have other hot components dumping heat on them. The fact that I lead my heat out of the case using water cooling may help.

This may change with Gen 5 devices?
 
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LazyGamer said:
As I recall, some parts of NVMe drives - like QLC flash chips - actually need to run a bit warmer.
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Excellent point.

Counterintuitively, write endurance of NAND flash is improved at elevated temperatures during the device's active (powered-on) state — up to a certain point. I don't know where the sweet spot is for the current generations of NAND; the papers I have are rather dated. There is of course the issue that the controller enjoys cool weather. ;)

Conversely, data retention is inversely proportional to temperature during storage in its powered-off state.

Tangentially related, I'm reminded of the following from a decade ago:
web.archive.org

Flash Memory Survives 100 Million Cycles

A little heat lets flash beat typical 10 000-cycle limit
web.archive.org web.archive.org
(the Wayback link bypasses the annoying paywall)
 
In regards to the CPU style cooler: yeah, no. Just plain no. If/when they need more aggressive cooling there are so many other alternatives.
 
Zarathustra said:
The 970 Evo is installed in an m.2 slot on the back of the motherboard. When I installed it, I made sure I added a thick enough thermal tape that it made contact with the motherboard tray, to help pull off any heat. It is unclear how much of the lower temp of the 970 Evo is due to this, and how much of it is due to the fact that it is an older Gen 3 design, compared to the other being Gen 4.

1657053815426.png
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WHOA, there is an M.2 slot on the underside of the motherboard!!!

Zarathustra said:
Also, is m.2 temperature really a problem?
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I've seen in reviews that some PCIe 3.0 drives like the ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro will throttle writes when they hit 70ºC, but this doesn't affect reads.
 
Drastically increasing the size of a heat sink reduces the temperature of the device its being used on? Yeah, seems likely but that's less impressive when it would have clearance issues with a lot of setups. Not to mention, it will probably be less aesthetically pleasing than the heat sinks that usually come with the motherboards.
 
Dan_D said:
Drastically increasing the size of a heat sink reduces the temperature of the device its being used on? Yeah, seems likely but that's less impressive when it would have clearance issues with a lot of setups. Not to mention, it will probably be less aesthetically pleasing than the heat sinks that usually come with the motherboards.
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Yea I stuck with the heatsink that came on my Corsair drive. I figured they know what they are doing.
 
DrezKill said:
WHOA, there is an M.2 slot on the underside of the motherboard!!!
Click to expand...

That's not the strangest place on this motherboard there are m.2 slots...

There is a weird slot on the motherboard called DIMM.2, which utilizes the same physical slot as used for RAM, but with a blocking bar so you cant install RAM in it. Instead the slot has PCIe lanes wired to it. It is intended for installing a DIMM.2 expansion card, that has three m.2 slots in it.

1657304932778.png

1657304957186.png

1657307487100.png

So, between the three on board m.2 slots (two under the motherboard heat spreader, and one on the back of the board) and the three slots in the DIMM.2 riser, there are 5 m.2 slots on this motherboard.

Then I guess I could add more by sticking those 16x PCIe to 4 m.2 slot risers in here as well.

I love all the PCIe lanes on the Threadripper.
 
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I hate when people use "percentage reduction" when referring to temperature. celcius and Fahrenheit zero is completely arbitrary and different from eachother, which makes "percentage reduction" completely arbitrary.

I suppose if you use Kelvin it has some better inherent meaning.
 
Zarathustra said:
That's not the strangest place on this motherboard there are m.2 slots...

There is a werd slot on the motherboard called DIMM.2, which utilizes the same physical slot as used for RAM, but with a blocking bar so you cant install RAM in it. Instead the slot has PCIe lanes wired to it. It is intended for installing a DIMM.2 expansion card, that has three m.2 slots in it.

View attachment 1744

View attachment 1745


So, between the three on board m.2 slots (two under the motherboard heat spreader, and one on the back of the board) and the three slots in the DIMM.2 riser, there are 5 m.2 slots on this motherboard.

Then I guess I could add more by sticking those 16x PCIe to 4 m.2 slot risers in here as well.

I love all the PCIe lanes on the Threadripper.
Click to expand...


I just grabbed mine from the box (not currently using it) and while I could have sworn there were two slots on one side and one on the other, it turns out I was wrong. Just one on each side.

PXL_20220708_184350114.jpg

PXL_20220708_184338096.jpg


PXL_20220708_184223386.jpg

PXL_20220708_184005590.jpg

I will say this though, having recently had to pull out one of the SSD's under the motherboard heat spreader, requiring me to remove my NIC, and my GPU and thus break into my water loop (thank the good lord for QDC's) this DIMM.2 slot is certainly more accessible, making it easier to replace M.2 drives...

The one on the bottom of the motherboard? Yeah that one is probably in there semi-permanently. I don't look forward to removing the motherboard to take it out. That's why I installed that one when I built the system rather than use the second slot on the top. I figured if I want to add another m.2 drive over time, I'd rather have it be one on the top, not one on the bottom.
 
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Brian_B said:
What a PITA to get at though. I'm still surprised we haven't seen many vertical risers for them.
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Yeah, I do wonder if those PCIe raid cards that Gigabyte and a few others were making would make more sense for some. I haven't seen any new ones in about a year or two though. Some even had built-in exhaust fans.

Edit: oops, didn't see that Zarathustra just posted about one but from ASUS.
 
Makes me wonder if I should have installed that heatsink on my m.2 when I installed it.... years ago. Eh, it'll be fine...
 
Zarathustra said:
I will say this though, having recently had to pull out one of the SSD's under the motherboard heat spreader, requiring me to remove my NIC, and my GPU and thus break into my water loop (thank the good lord for QDC's) this DIMM.2 slot is certainly more accessible, making it easier to replace M.2 drives...
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I totally agree. At first, I really liked the idea of having them out of the way in the motherboard but now that I'm thinking about upgrading to a 2 TB game drive I'm totally annoyed that I'm going to have to pull out the GPU, and its cabling just so I can have access to the cover to remove it. I know this is a 1st world problem but it's still annoying. I've been trying to simplify the overall physical layouts of my rigs in recent years but there are definitely pros and cons with this.
 
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