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 the 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 installed in a typical case, in the M.2 slot between the CPU and VGA card. A second data point is provided which 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 get warm enough to start throttling.


With heavy writes, the drive will start throttling once it reaches 80°C, but the speed drop is rather small and more gradual as the temperature increases.

Thermal Image & Hot Spot

During the write test, we recorded a thermal image of the running SSD. The hottest part, which seems to be the controller, reaches 82°C, which is close enough to the values reported by the drive's SMART temperature monitoring.