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 which generates some airflow around the CPU socket.

This first round of thermal testing is done without any heatsink installed.

Reads

Writes

Very decent results; only a little bit of throttling when writing, and no throttling otherwise.


With the graphene heatspreader installed, temperatures are almost 10°C better—no more throttling.


Once we installed the big heatsink, temperatures dropped even further, almost 20°C vs. the uncooled drive.

Thermal Image & Hot Spot

Our thermal camera confirms these findings.