Thermal Throttling

Due to the compact form factor, M.2 drives lack the ability to cool themselves and usually have to rely on passive airflow instead. As a safeguard, all vendors include some form of thermal throttling on their drives, 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, in the M.2 slot between the CPU and VGA card. A second data point shows the result when a 120 mm fan is blowing directly on the tested 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 °C (measured using SMART).


In a pure read scenario, the drive doesn't throttle at all.


Without a fan or heatsink, the drive will start throttling after about 100 GB have been written in a short time, which should be sufficient for most users. If you expect longer sustained writes, you should install the included heatsink, which is really easy to do and makes a huge difference in this scenario. Actually, I'd say that unless you have a motherboard with its own M.2 cooling solution, I'd just always install the heatsink once and be done with it.

Thermal Image & Hot Spot

We recorded a thermal image of the running SSD as it was completing the write test. The hottest part reached 102°C, which is almost 30°C higher than what's reported through the driver's own SMART temperature monitoring.