Mine run in the 20s-40s so I would say 70 is a bit warm compared to what I am used to
I dont think I have seen a NVME in a M.2 slot go that low
, for me they have always been notably hotter than SATA, although my Intel PCIE slot NVME is now going below 30C, so I guess in my case air flow around the base of the board is poor, which isnt surprising for the main slot next to the CPU.
Currently 3 WD spindles 27C, the 4th 26C, 860 EVO SATA 24C, Intel DC P4600 PCIe NVME 22C, 980 Pro M.2 NVME 38C no heatsink, and WD SN850X M.2 NVME also 38C motherboard heatsink. Can see both M.2 running hotter than spindles.
--
Anyway news on the Sabrent Rocket, well its worse than the WD SN570 lol. However with much less impact on CPU.
Ambient temp 20C during testing.
Windows 10 clean install.
SB-2130-256 NVME 66C (orange in diskinfo), CPU 42C
pfSense
SB-2130-256 NVME 76C, CPU 48C
I also tested a old Samsung 830 SATA by powering it externally and not quite fully sealing case so could feed cable through.
Windows 10 clean install.
Samsung 830 SATA 39C CPU 31C
PfSense
Samsung 830 SATA 37C CPU 39C (so CPU hotter than storage in this config).
NVME seems a bad idea in NUCs, or at least in the one I got which is tiny.
I also had a new 80mm USB fan arrive triple speed, but this thing even low speed is still 2000 RPM, not as noisy as other fan in terms of the air noise but it buzzes. However I have found the fans I used to use to cool my Asus AC68 router years back, and they are pretty quiet, definitely tolerable, so the WD is back in there and those fans are on now I think they 60mm eye balling them, they just resting on top of the case which itself is the heat sink for CPU, and have to use both as they wired to same cable.. Also thinking about the RAM temps as well.
When the SATA power cable arrives I might do a permanent swap to SATA.
FreeBSD also is very primitive in power management, from my investigating, ASPM isnt used, C-states default to C1, and with manual intervention cant get higher than C3, this is in addition to the NVME power state issue. The temps I posted are with C2 as I observed C3 is same temps as C2, C1 temps are about 4C higher. CPU idles at 400mhz in Windows but about 1.3-1.7.ghz in FreeBSD.
While NAND flash does like higher temperatures, NAND controllers generally don't, and 70 degrees does sound excessive - the higher link state shouldn't be a problem unless the drive is constantly being thrashed with reads and writes. I would suggest trying an external NVMe-to-USB adapter/case which will both move the heat-producing SSD away from the CPU, and allow the SSD to dissipate heat much more easily. At any rate it's a cheaper option than forking out for an SSD that runs cooler!
Interesting idea thanks, although I think I would probably end up using my USB to SATA adaptor if I did this since I already have two of those adaptors. Will deffo go external storage if I decide to ditch active cooling, makes a lot of sense.
