Performance - No Heatsink

First, we benchmarked the drives without the heatsinks in place, during which they got quite hot in their cages. While running idle had no real world implication regardless of fan settings, things looked much different when putting quite the load on them. For this test, we use the same benchmarking as we do in our separate SSD reviews to heat them up, and with the fans off or on low, the drives would go beyond 80°C in no time. On high, things were not looking much better with temperatures as high as 74°C at worst.

As you can see below, that means the drives simply throttle completely with no fans and are negatively affected by throttling down on the low fan setting. Only once things are switched to high do they manage to stay just cool enough to provide their full performance.

Fan Off

Fan Low

Fan High

Performance - With Heatsink

In comparison, with the heatsinks on, the benefit really showed during the load tests as temperatures never even came close to breaking 50°C. The graph below shows how well behaved the drives are with even the fans off, which is because of the massive 94 g heatsink employed for each NVMe drive. This basically means the MB720M2K-B can be used in extremely hot environments without issue as there is plenty of thermal headroom.

Fan Off

Noise Levels

Taking a look at the noise levels, it also quickly becomes apparent that you would not want to use the fans in a single-user workstation setting as they are way too loud while only really providing quite the limited benefit in regards to cooling performance. That having been said, there are plenty of scenarios where airflow trumps noise—say, in a commercial airline or a government deployment where basically anything surrounding these bays will be louder anyways.