Thermal Throttling

Due to the compact form factor, M.2 drives usually lack the ability to actively cool themselves, typically 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 drive without additional cooling. 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.

Reads

Writes

Without decent cooling the drive will throttle quickly, even in reads, too. Unlike the Corsair MP700, which crashed due to thermal protection kicking in, the Tiger Shark Elite works much better and continues to work stably, at greatly reduced speed though.

Thermal Image & Hot Spot

We recorded a thermal image of the running SSD as it was completing the write test. The surface temperature of the heatsink 100°C, which confirms that good cooling is needed. Please also note that the on-drive temperature sensor will report 80°C, when the controller is really running at 100°C.