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, 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'll 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 2019 SSD bench because we're using a different case and a CPU cooler which generates some airflow around the CPU socket.

Reads

Writes

No thermal throttling at all—excellent.

Thermal Image & Hot Spot

We recorded a thermal image of the running SSD as it was completing the write test. The hottest part on the drive reached 63°C, which is a very good result. I was curious and also tested the drive without the heatsink installed. Temperatures from the on-die sensor are roughly 5°C lower, and the FLIR thermal camera reading was even better than that. This confirms that the heatsink does have a positive effect on temperatures. Just to clarify, the 63°C reading is with the heatsink covering the controller, so we can't see its actual temperature, and it's hard to compare to the 92°C reading from the second image. The temperature is no doubt higher than the 63°C recorded on the surface of the heatspreader.