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.

Pre-Installed Heatsink

Good temperatures, there's no throttling at all.

Bare Drive without Heatsink

To get a feel for the overall heat output of the drive, I ran it without heatsink. It throttled fairly quickly in both read and write, but even when throttled you still get excellent speeds of 3 GB/s. This means that for lighter consumer-oriented workloads you'll be fine running an uncooled drive.

Thermalright Heatsink

I also tested with a Thermalright TR-M2, which is a compact full-metal heatsink. This helps to get a feel for how powerful the Corsair stock heatsink is. Clearly, the Thermalright isn't as powerful as the Corsair cooler, but it's a reasonable low-cost solution that prolongs throttling for "long enough" in nearly all usage scenarios.

Pre-Installed Heatsink + Fan

Finally, to find out what's possible, I put an 80 mm fan in front of the drive to achieve as low as possible temperatures. As expected, no thermal throttling.


Our FLIR thermal camera shows that the drive reaches 77°C at full load, which really isn't a lot considering the performance offered.