Kingston A1000 480 GB Review 13

Kingston A1000 480 GB Review

Windows 10 Startup & File Compression »

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. As a safeguard, all vendors include some form of thermal throttling on their drives, 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. A second data point shows the result when a 120 mm fan is blowing directly 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).


In a pure read scenario, the drive doesn't throttle at all.


Even without a fan, during writes, the drive doesn't throttle either due to temperature. The drop down to 500 MB/s you see is identical in both the cooled and uncooled test, so it's not due to temperature. Rather, it's the effect of the small 4 GB SLC write cache, as reported on the previous page.

Thermal Image & Hot Spot

Thermal Camera FLIR Image during Write Test

We recorded a thermal image of the running SSD as it was completing the write test. The hottest part reached 90°C, which is almost 15°C higher than what's reported through SMART temperature monitoring.
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Dec 23rd, 2024 12:56 EST change timezone

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