Thermal Throttling

Due to the compact form factor, M.2 drives lack the ability to actively cool themselves, usually having to rely on passive airflow instead. All vendors include some form of thermal throttling on their drives as a safeguard, which limits throughput once a certain temperature is exceeded.

On this page, we will investigate whether the tested drive has such a mechanism, how high temperatures get, and what effect this has on performance. We will test the drive in a typical case, installed in the M.2 slot between the CPU and VGA card, while it's getting hammered by non-stop incoming writes. A first test run, to create a baseline, shows temperature and performance with a 120 mm fan directly blowing on the tested drive. In a second run we report thermal performance of the completely uncooled drive. Each of the charts has time moving from left to right, with the blue line displaying transfer speed in MB/s and the red line showing the temperature in degrees Celsius (measured using SMART).

Results from this test setup are not comparable to our older SSD benches because we're using a different case and an AIO watercooling unit, so there's very little airflow inside the case.

Reads

Writes

"No fan" in the charts above means "no additional" fan, the fan integrated in the heatsink is always running and part of this measurement

There is no thermal throttling and temperatures are very low. Unfortunately fan noise is very high, even when barely loaded or idle. There is no idle-fan-stop.