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).

Reads

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

Writes

Without a fan, the drive throttles pretty quickly, after around a minute of full load, which is rather short. With 70°C, the throttle temperature seems a bit low, too. Still, a throttled performance of over 1 GB/s is very good. Also refer to the second chart, which shows the unthrottled behavior of the drive, so some performance drops are expected due to the way the pseudo-SLC cache works.

With Heatsink Installed

With the included heatsink installed, idle temperatures went down by 5°C. For load, there is no difference in temperature, but the throttling activity seems to be much more well-behaved, no longer dropping below 1 GB/s. Given the installation of this heatsink is very easy and takes just a few minutes, we highly recommend this to all desktop users.

Thermal Image & Hot Spot

We recorded a thermal image of the running SSD as it was completing the write test (with the heatsink installed). The hottest part reached 80°C, which is a bit higher than what the drive's own SMART temperature monitoring reports, but not critically high in any way. Rather, it would have been good if ADATA allowed for 5–10 °C higher temperature, which could have yielded more thermal headroom.