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 and the M.2 slot between the CPU and VGA card. A second data point shows the result with a 120 mm fan directly blowing 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).

Results from this test setup are not comparable to our 2019 SSD bench because we're using a different case and a CPU cooler that generates some airflow around the CPU socket.

Unlike most other SSDs, the Samsung 980 Pro has two thermal sensors, one inside the controller (green line) and another that measures the temperature of the flash chips (red line).

Reads

Writes

Thermal Image & Hot Spot

We recorded a thermal image of the running SSD as it was completing the write test. The hottest part reached 82°C, while the on-drive thermal sensors reported 86°C.