Friday, May 12th 2023
Crucial T700 Gen 5 SSD Throttles Down to HDD Performance Levels Without a Cooler
Crucial T700, the company's flagship M.2 NVMe Gen 5 SSD, runs hot—like every other drive based on the Phison E26-series controller (such as the Corsair MP700). ComputerBase.de discovered what the drive does without some sort of cooling. The E26 controller has a Tjmax value of around 86°C, and what happens when it's reached depends on the drive in question. The Corsair MP700 can turn itself off to protect the controller—something that will definitely cause your machine to hang with a BSOD.
The Crucial T700, on the other hand, aggressively throttles down the controller in an attempt to lower temperatures. While the drive won't stop (and your machine won't hang), its performance drops to hard drive levels, with CrystalDiskMark (CDM) measurements pointing to around 101 MB/s (of course, with much lower access times than a HDD). Both Crucial and Corsair offer the drive with large heatsinks, and recommend users to use them. This should severely limit the adoption of Gen 5 NVMe SSDs among notebooks, where the notebook chassis has room for only bare drives. However, some OEMs specializing in larger high-end gaming notebooks and desktop-replacement workstations, can find ways to connect the drives to the notebook's main cooling system using flattened heatpipes. You can catch ComputerBase's review of the MP700 in the source link below.
Sources:
ComputerBase.de (Twitter), ComputerBase.de
The Crucial T700, on the other hand, aggressively throttles down the controller in an attempt to lower temperatures. While the drive won't stop (and your machine won't hang), its performance drops to hard drive levels, with CrystalDiskMark (CDM) measurements pointing to around 101 MB/s (of course, with much lower access times than a HDD). Both Crucial and Corsair offer the drive with large heatsinks, and recommend users to use them. This should severely limit the adoption of Gen 5 NVMe SSDs among notebooks, where the notebook chassis has room for only bare drives. However, some OEMs specializing in larger high-end gaming notebooks and desktop-replacement workstations, can find ways to connect the drives to the notebook's main cooling system using flattened heatpipes. You can catch ComputerBase's review of the MP700 in the source link below.
70 Comments on Crucial T700 Gen 5 SSD Throttles Down to HDD Performance Levels Without a Cooler
Next gen CPU and GPU are getting hotter, now SSD.
I thought next gen should also mean better power efficiency.
www.tomshardware.com/news/pcie-50-ssds-generates-errors-shut-down-without-cooler-fix-on-the-way
Now, we need AIO or more than 1 kg of aluminum for cooling of high-end CPU. That is generally wrong direction that HW development took many years ago, along with some basic physics kicking in now when we are to single-digit nm level...
That doesn't sound cohesive to me :)
W1zz found the same in his review of the Corsair drive, that it suffered from thermal shutdowns. The Phison rep actually answered folks' questions, I liked that.
As for the SSDs. Do we really need 10GB/sec? PCIe 3.0 speeds are more than enough and only pros and gamers with zero patience really need more.
Also, instead of optimization of software, we are just increasing complexity to stupid levels and solve everything with MOAR RAM, MOAR MHz, MOAR everything. Completely unsustainable... But, yes, that is what we (in general, as consumers) wanted...
Edit: And just to cover all sides, Nvidia also pushed their cards too far with Fermi.
But yes, the bottleneck with SSDs isn't their sequential performance, it's the random reads. PCIe (any revision) will do little to help with that.
Also don't get the push back on putting heat sinks on SSD drives, although I'm sure the same was said about adding a heat sink to the CPU and then to the GPU, and then all over again when water cooling became a thing...the horror.
I started collecting SSD heat sinks a couple of years ago because I was intrigued about their effectiveness. They do work, some better than others and the one that works best right now is one with a full copper heat sink. I've also had mixed results putting thermal pads on the entire SSD, as is norm, vs. just the chips. What does help most is getting airflow on the heatsink. My gen4 980Pro doesn't go above 43C under heavy loads with ambient temps at 78 degrees and it does not have a fan attached to it, but it does have a full copper heatsink.
How much improvement have we witnessed since PCIe 4 drives were introduced? Zero. For SSDs, going faster = going hotter. The same thing to do, imho, would be to put a cap on sequential transfer speeds and concentrate on improving random access instead.
Also the drive throttling (especially if done gruadually, not suddenly) while still operating correctly is a good thing, way better than not throttling (or not enough) and getting R/W errors like the Corsair MP700.