As next-gen storage gets hotter, designs are getting wacky:
Feature As the latest generation of M.2 SSDs have trickled out to consumer platforms we've seen some wild and wacky cooling solutions strapped to them: heat pipes, 20,000 rpm fans, even tiny liquid coolers.
Perhaps the most extreme example we've seen so far is Adata Project NeonStorm. It packs a self contained liquid-cooling system, complete with pump, reservoir, radiator and pair of fans to the the gum-stick-sized drive. However, it is hardly the only one. TeamGroup and Inland have also strapped fans and even whole cooling towers to their SSDs.
But are PCIe 5.0 SSDs so hot they need active cooling or are all these fan-strapped SSDs just a gimmick playing on gamers' ignorance or irrational love of unicorn barf? Oh, did we mention many also have RGB?
In a blog post containing very little specifics, Adata makes the case that traditional passive heat dissipation is inadequate to meet demands of PCIe 5.0 SSDs and that some kind of active heat dissipation is now a requirement.
Micron's Jon Tanguy, who works on SSDs under the company's Crucial product group, isn't so sure. He tells The Register that while it's true that the latest generation of SSDs really are running hotter, Crucial doesn't yet see the need for active cooling for its drives.
With each subsequent PCIe generation, bandwidth per lane typically doubles. With PCIe 4.0 SSDs, we were closing in on the theoretical max of 8GBps. Today, a PCIe Gen 5.0 x4 SSD is capable of anywhere from 10-14GBps once you factor in the litany of bottleneck and storage overheads.
The amount of activity taking place on the gumstick-sized M.2 form factor means higher temps not only for the storage controller, but for the NAND flash itself.
NAND, Tanguy explains, is happiest within a relatively narrow temperature band. "NAND flash actually likes to be 'hot' in that 60° to 70° [celcius] range in order to program a cell because when it's that hot, those electrons can move a little bit easier," he explained.
Go a little too hot — say 80°C — and things become problematic, however. At these temps, you risk the SSD's built-in safety mechanisms forcibly powering down the system to prevent damage. However, before this happens users are likely to see the performance of their drives plummet, as the SSD's controller throttles itself to prevent data loss.
The latter is one of the reasons why even during the PCIe 4.0 generation it wasn't uncommon to see aluminum or even copper heatsinks sold alongside premium models.
The takeaway is that with PCIe 5.0 SSDs — the performance oriented models in particular — some kind of cooler is necessary to achieve peak performance. Whether it needs to be actively cooled is another question entirely.
[...] There's also the potential for these SSD's larger coolers to interfere with other components, like CPU tower coolers or GPUs. This is because the majority of PCIe 5.0 slots are located just below the CPU socket to minimize trace length to ensure signal integrity.
So, do you really need a liquid cooled SSD? Probably not, but if you want one anyway, we can't say we blame you.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Runaway1956 on Sunday May 28 2023, @10:54PM
Well, anything without RBG is from the stone age. /sarcasm
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bart9h on Monday May 29 2023, @12:49AM (5 children)
Unless it is for a very specific need, if the component requires cooling then it is poorly designed.
Do normal consumers need that much speed? Normal SSDs are fast enough already.
I much prefer to buy a video card with passive cooling to play games from 5 or 10 years ago, then a watt hungry lava spewing monster to handle the newest games.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Monday May 29 2023, @12:59AM
You can get notable advantages from having a lava spewing RTX 4090, whether it's for gaming or ML/compute. A PCIe 5.0 SSD will do almost nothing for anybody for the next decade. PCIe 4.0 SSD prices are reasonable, with no active cooling.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Opportunist on Monday May 29 2023, @02:58AM (2 children)
Most of all, the extra speed more often than not goes to waste. Reading data at 200GB/sec means nothing if you can't process it at that speed, and more often than not, this can't be handled by the bus, the ram, CPU or the GPU eventually having to deal with the data.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Monday May 29 2023, @04:04PM (1 child)
Put a load of simple processing cores in the SSD and have the main CPU farm out tasks to them.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2, Interesting) by leromarinvit on Tuesday May 30 2023, @02:47PM
Incidentally, this is actually happening: https://lwn.net/Articles/931949/ [lwn.net]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by acid andy on Monday May 29 2023, @03:17PM
Agree about the design fail with regard to an SSD.
Years ago one of my spinning rust hard drives was overheating for some reason and a small fan with a screw on shroud made it reliable again until I could afford to replace it.
But water cooling on an SSD? That's just stupid. A major selling point of Solid State is there's no moving parts. Water pumps or spinning fans are moving parts. Noisy too.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?