Do SSDs need Cooling?

SSDs are generally well-off without any type of active cooling but a passive cooling like heatsinks are always good. SSDs come with the inbuilt throttling mechanism which reduces the SSD performance in order to compensate for the temperature. Generally, this temperature ranges between 70°C and 85°C. SSDs don’t easily reach these high-temperature ranges unless you are putting some serious load on them. Some tasks like moving large files, gaming, 3D rendering, running virtual machines, or machine learning workloads can increase the SSD temperature above the normal limits.

In the market, you can find SSD coolers with fins and fans just like the CPU coolers. However, most people would not need them. There are no drawbacks of using those coolers as well. What I am saying that there is generally no need of using them. They would contribute to noise, extra power consumption, and occupy extra space in the case.

Do SSDs need cooling?

However, there are reasons to employ active cooling which we are going to discuss in this article. So, let’s get started.

Let’s understand the issue first

If you are someone whose work depends more on the data movement especially writing the data, your storage game must be well-optimized for performance and thermals. Now, if you use a normal SSD without a heatsink, your SSD can throttle and even fail faster.

I will tell you why.

SSDs generally throttle their speed when the temperature goes beyond 70 degrees Celsius. This is a point when the SSD will drop its speed in order to maintain a healthy temperature. It’s basically a safety mechanism that is essential but works by hampering the performance.

Now, if you want your SSD to never thermal throttle, you need an active cooling setup for your drive. Active cooling is when you have some kind of fan or liquid working to keep the heat away while passive cooling is just a simple heatsink. The labels on most SSDs work as passive heatsinks.

So, all this is to stop the SSD from reaching the throttling point. However, if it reaches that point, the SSD have the mechanism to stop itself from burning. However, we are talking about the extremes. The work most people do on their computers can hardly make the SSDs so heated up that they throttle. Tasks like large file transfers, 3D rendering, video rendering, VMs, benchmarking/stress testing, Cryptocurrency mining, Chia farming, can increase the SSD temperature significantly.

Reasons why SSDs heat or overheat

Any computer component would heat up when you put it under a load. SSDs overheat because of the rapid data movement for which they are designed. But, let’s get into the specifics here.

Reason 1: Electrical Resistance

The way SSDs work is phenomenally amazing. Data is stored in the form of electric charge in either floating gate transistors or charge-trap flash. So, everything is electric charge. Now, when this data has to move here and there, the circuits (electric pathways) possess some resistance to it. Resistance creates heat. Now, as the speed of this data movement increases, the heat increases proportionally. Also, as the heat increases, the resistance increases more. So, there is a feedback loop that results in thermal throttling.

The data is stored in the form of electric charge in the NAND flash memory while the controller is where most of the calculations happen.  Although the Flash is where the data is stored, the SSD Controller is the hottest part of any SSD because of the higher movement of electrons.

Reason 2: The higher Processing Capabilities of Modern SSDs and their contribution to heat

As the data read/write speed increases, the controller has to do calculations at a much faster pace. DRAM can also get hot when write operations are on a surge.

The modern Gen 5.0 drives can easily go beyond 10GB/s or sequential speed. The upcoming Samsung 9100 Pro promises a maximum sequential read speed of 14,800 MB/s and a write speed of 13,400 MB/s. The maximum random read IOPS is 2200K. So, the point is, that this high speed creates a huge flow of current which will eventually raise the temperature.

Most modern Gen 5.0 SSDs are consuming more power than the earlier PCIe versions. For example, the Crucial T700 4TB (heatsink), when stressed, reached the maximum power consumption of 12.29 watts. The temperate, surprisingly, topped at around 49 degrees Celsius. This is because of the passive heatsink. It is advised not to use these drives without the heatsinks that come along with them.

The Extent of Overheating – How Hot is Too Hot?

The standard temperature span for consumer-grade NAND memory chips lies between 0 and 85 degrees Celsius. Some Gen 5.0 drives are designed to throttle at temperatures as high as 90°C. So, overheating is different for different SSDs but a temperature going above 70°C is considered overheating. Some people would say 80°C but because of the SSD’s designs, the limits can surely vary.

Manufacturers know their SSD’s limits and some SSDs only come with pre-installed heatsinks. However, some drives have options to choose from with or without a heatsink. A small heatsink can reduce the temperature by 10 to 15% while the large (fin-type) heatsinks can reduce up to 20 to 30%.

SSDs inbuilt heat-protection system- Thermal Throttling

Passive heatsinks are one thing. SSDs have protection on the software level a well. Thermal throttling is a self-preservation mechanism implemented in SSD firmware, activated generally after the temperature goes above 70°C. The mechanism is simple. It just works by curtailing the performance and the heat reduces automatically. Now, because the heat will take some time to go away, the throttling happens before the temperature is dangerously high. Different SSDs will come with different throttling points but you understand the concept right?

Without thermal throttling, the drive will burn itself reaching a point where the heat can’t be tolerated by the internal components. The performance drop is generally 50% but it can be more than 50 sometimes. Now, depending on the ambient temperature, the drive can take a long or short time to get inside safe limits. Only after reaching a safe point will the SSD start to work normally.

Do SSDs need active cooling?

You can literally buy waterblocks for M.2 drives these days. Corsair has its own MP600 Pro which is equipped with a water-block setup. As we discussed earlier, most drives come with passive heatsinks. And I think passive cooling is enough for SSDs. However, that too isn’t necessary if your workloads are simple.

You should consider active cooling like, M.2 coolers or waterblocks if you think you’ll take your drive to its limits. Also, if you experienced that the drive is reaching the thermal throttle frequently, you may need active cooling.

Normally, there is no need to set up any kind of active cooling for any M.2 drives except if you have a server environment at your home. The modern Gen 4.0 and Gen 5.0 drives are reaching high temperatures and the manufacturers know that. So, you get heatsink options with them. You can just go for them.

You drive can go above 60 and even reach 70°C during burst write loads. There is hardly anything that you can do on your personal computer that can make your drive (with a heatsink) reach throttling. Without heatsink, tasks like video rendering and gaming can a great load and can even result in throttling but not burn your drive.

When to active-cool an SSD?

You should definitely go for a good passive cooler SSD if you do heavy read/write operations and the SSD is reaching its throttle pretty soon. (You can use software like HWInfo to monitor the SSD temperature). If you think the drive is getting restricted to work to its fullest because of the excessive heat, you can install an active cooler on your SSD.

Another situation is when you have a full-fledged custom water loop build, you can just get an SSD water block and connect it through the main line.

Some of the things that may result in SSD overheating are 3D rendering, high-resolution video editing, database operations, virtualization, game installation and updates, and file compression/decompression. If you also do these things, you can get a passive M.2 heatsink like this. However, if your motherboard has a M.2 heatsink, there is not need to buy anything extra.

Reasons not to active-cool and SSD. Why passive cooling is enough?

SSDs aren’t always actively passing the data to your CPU. It generally sit idle waiting for the instruction for the required data. Even if you use it for any prolonged read/write tasks, it will have enough time to cool down. Also, the passive cooling label on your drive will be more than enough to dissipate that heat.

Again, until you are using your system for heavy read/write operations 24×7, there is no reason to go for any active SSD cooling.

Passive cooling is enough for SSDs because the controller is the main part creating the heat and that is only when the drive is working at 100% or near that. There is hardly any task you can do to make that 100% happen on your computer.

Tom’s Hardware temperature observations on Gen 5 NVMe Crucial T700

In a thorough assessment, Tom’s Hardware scrutinized the thermal performance of the latest Gen 5 NVMe Crucial T700, especially during extreme workloads initiated through DiskBench and Iometer write saturation testing.

It was observed that during the highly strenuous Iometer write saturation test, which represents a near-worst-case scenario of SSD usage, the T700, equipped with a heatsink, recorded a peak temperature of 87°C at the SSD controller. Consequently, thermal throttling was activated, identified through periodic performance dips observed around the 850-second mark of the test.

Despite this, it should be underscored that the periods of reduced performance lasted less than a second before returning to saturated speeds for about 10 seconds, undergoing a repetitive cycle until the workload completion. This pattern ensued due to an incredible 2.95 TB of data being written to the T700 during a compact 15-minute stress test – a circumstance far removed from typical consumer drive usage.

In a less demanding DiskBench testing environment, where 100GB of files were transferred to the drive thrice in quick succession, the temperatures remained at a more controlled 51°C peak.

The test actually concluded that if your drive is working under a huge load that replicates a server environment, the drive gets pretty hot and throttled. Otherwise, this Gen 5.0 which can reach above 10GB/s sequential read speed is enough to cool it down on its own.

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