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. 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 and the M.2 slot between the CPU and VGA card. A second data point shows the result with a 120 mm fan directly blowing 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).

Results from this test setup are not comparable to our 2019 SSD bench, because we're using a different case and a CPU cooler which generates some airflow around the CPU socket.

Reads

Writes

Even without the heatsink, we only see a little bit of throttling. The spiky chart might look scary at first, but the performance drop is actually not that big a deal, especially considering the intense workload.



With the heatsink added, there's a tiny bit less throttling, but the difference seems minimal. The rate of temperature change—how steep the curve is as the drive heats up—looks virtually identical to having no heatsink. This and the lack of noteworthy temperature changes suggests that the heatsink has very little effect and doesn't really make any difference.

Thermal Image & Hot Spot

We recorded a thermal image of the running SSD as it was completing the write test. The hottest part reached 74°C, which is fairly low and pretty close to what the drive's own thermal sensors report. It seems the thermal limits are quite conservative on this drive.