Thermal Throttling

Due to the compact form factor, M.2 drives lack the ability to actively cool themselves, usually 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 completely uncooled 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 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.

Bare Drive without Heatsink

First, I've tested the drive in the out-of-the-box configuration, without any heatsink or additional airflow. Pretty good results, there's a little bit of thermal throttling in the write test, but only after almost two minutes of non-stop write activity at maximum speed.

Drive with Thermalright Heatsink

Next, I installed a Thermalright TR-M2, which is a compact full-metal heatsink. Throttling is avoided completely now!

Drive with big Thermalright Heatsink

With a much bigger Thermalright HR-10, the temperatures are even better, but there is no additional performance available.

Drive with Fan

Finally, to find out what's possible, and as control, I put a big 80 mm fan in front of the drive with the stock heatsink, to achieve as low as possible temperatures. As expected, no thermal throttling, but also no additional performance vs the numbers with the Thermalright heatsinks.

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 drive reached 110°C.