Thermal Throttling

Due to the compact form factor, M.2 drives usually lack the ability to actively cool themselves, typically 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 drive without additional cooling. 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

There's very little thermal throttling, and only during writes.

Thermal Image & Hot Spot

We recorded a thermal image of the running SSD as it was completing the write test. The surface temperature of the heatsink reached 63°C, which is very low. It seems that there is a fairly large temperature gradient between the heatsink surface and the drive, probably because the thermal tape is a bit on the thick side.