High-end M.2 NVMe SSDs are beginning to come with integrated heatsinks as overheating controllers impact sustained performance. The latest such drive is a new edition of the Hall of Fame (HOF) M.2 PCIe series from Galaxy, which come with a chunky aluminium heatsink, only this one isn't just another hunk of metal. This heatsink uses a flattened copper heat pipe to pull heat from the drive's hot components and spread it evenly along both sides of the aluminium block. The heat pipe makes direct contact with the drive's Phison PS5012-E12 8-channel controller and Toshiba-made 64-layer 3D TLC NAND flash chips.

The heatsink wraps around sideways of the drive and so it may not be a perfect fit for NVMe RAID cards with multiple M.2 slots side-by-side, although for most applications, such as the M.2 slot on the motherboard, the design could click. The drive comes in capacities of 512 GB, 1 TB, and 2 TB. All three models offer sequential read speeds of up to 3400 MB/s. The 1 TB and 2 TB models write at up to 2800 MB/s, while the 512 GB writes at up to 2000 MB/s. 4K random access performance of the 2 TB and 1 TB models are rated at up to 400,000 IOPS reads with up to 600,000 IOPS writes; and up to 400,000 IOPS reads with up to 540,000 IOPS writes for the 512 GB model. The drive is initially being launched in China, and could make its way to western markets under the Galax and KFA2 brands later this year.