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
Can't you do you editing in a workstation instead a laptop?
Refinement takes years, and they're not giving themselves that time - by the time PCI-E gen 4 NVME's had 2-3 revisions under their belt, gen 5 was out and it's back to testing out brand new inefficient stuff again.With NVME drives it's usually the controller that overheats, which works fine with a very small amount of cooling material - many just use a thin bit of copper tape
It's usually just an assumption that
"motherboards have NVME coolers already, so let's not include one and save money" leads to people running without cooling at all
Or
"The average user doesnt run into this in our testing based on a bunch of assumptions, so it doesnt matter"
Two: if you know you'll use the potential then get yourself plenty of airflow in the case.
People are so aghast its so hot and throttles like mad. And how it can be not? Gen5 NVMe controller power draw is on par with enterprise grade RAID controller. If you leave say 8xxx series card from Adaptec/Microsemi/whoever bought them next/ without enough airflow controller will reach 100C in space of few seconds. With each RAID ctrl -usually- comes a memo in the box that you need 200 CFM of airflow for efficient cooling and you have 50x50 radiator installed on the chip.. That's 17W of power draw in a nutshell. Gen5 M.2 NVMe stick can only be worse because it has much smaller surface area to evaporate the heat.
Need a beefy card with huge radiator and plenty of unobstructed airflow. Something along the lines of Accelsior 4M2 or 8M2 form OWC, but these are not Gen 5.
None of what you've said has *anything* to do with NVME drives
I have a Samsung 980PRO which is 5g and can use 6W of power, while my 7900 XT Pulse is 1360g where the cooler is about ~1200g of the total weight.
That ~100g PCB uses "only" ~330W, and I cannot tell when I seen a top tier card with passive cooler, so I would say airflow is matters - a lot
So if someone made a ~100W passive card, they would rely on the pc case's airflow to carry away the heat.
But... by this much?
That's not something you need case fans for, or talk about high end cooling
It's something a very small heatsink can handle, or the lightest airflow.
Not a great start, products seem rushed to market, one turns itself off when too hot, the other throttles excessively. Why they trying so bad to save a few $ on not providing with a heatsink?The whole PC tech industry has decided they going all in on performance. Heat, power consumption have clearly gone down the priority list.
It seems utterly ridiculous this path has been chosen on SSDs though as the difference will only be seen in benchmarking.Node shrinks harm nand, thats why nand stacking became a thing.One already exists, called U.2, but seems they kept it of consumer machines for the same reason they dont get SAS.
So PCI Express slot drives would be the logical solution, but wait... a lot of board vendors now ship with barely any PCIE slots. (Current example, p460 DC SSD in my machine right now idling at 22C, load temp in 30s, is a 12W SSD under load).
It absolutely destroys it :(
Early 2.5" SSD's looked like this, with multiple flash chips spread out everywhere
Vs a modern WD green 1TB
These can have the exact same issues with a controller overheating, most just use a single thermal pad to connect to whatever enclosure they're in, even if its plastic.
Since flash memory speeds are way above what SATA can achieve, they use as few memory chips as possible making them rather small.2W to 10W?
5x power consumption for 80x the performance is hardly destroyed, especially when the NVME would finish in a single second what that mech drive would take 10 minutes to complete, if it was best-case for the mech drive (single large write to an empty drive) thus idling faster and using much much less power for the same task.
That WD document shows "average" wattages, not maximum or peak. Averages will always be in an NVME's favour since it's so much faster it'll finish the task and idle while the mech drive is still spinning up. Literally in many cases.
Yes I know about u.2, but for some reason those are not really spreading, because it could give us what I asking for in my last sentence.
You'd need PCI-E x4 riser cables to the SSD, which is a bit impractical - you could always use riser cards/RAID cards if you really wanted to, but when i tried that they ran way hotter and i returned it (WD AN1500)
temperatures mean it needs more cooling, wattage shows how hard it will be to cool.
10 watts is nothing, it's just at the edge of being unable to run without cooling when the controller is so small. A heatsink the size of a coin would make a massive difference.