SilverStone's New M.2 SSD Riser Card Fights Overheating

[Guest]

SilverStone revealed its new ECM23 M.2 riser card for people who want to upgrade their storage without having to purchase a new motherboard.

SilverStone's New M.2 SSD Riser Card Fights Overheating : Read more

 

[bogdi1988]

LOL! Fry's has been selling this for a while now. This is just a rebadge.

 

[planedrop]

Why? Actively cooling SSDs with heatsinks is a bad idea, there is a reason the companies that make the actual drives don't include heatsinks. The flash is meant to get hot, it's just the controller that has to be kept cold. This is why some SSDs are even designed to move the heat from the controller onto the flash, because flash actually works better at higher temps. Intel and the like stress test their flash by cooling it down lol.

 

[luckymatt42]

Ya I've been trying to warn others off of those "M.2 Coolerz" for awhile now. The flip side of that though is that us computer geeks have been trained with the "cooler is better" mantra for years now...generally true, but not in all cases.

 

[stdragon]

I got a cheapie Chinese special (anodized aluminum strips for both sides) held together with two included bands. It does the job well and prevents thermal throttling. And, it doesn't look bad at all.

 

[BaRoMeTrIc]

Why? Actively cooling SSDs with heatsinks is a bad idea, there is a reason the companies that make the actual drives don't include heatsinks. The flash is meant to get hot, it's just the controller that has to be kept cold. This is why some SSDs are even designed to move the heat from the controller onto the flash, because flash actually works better at higher temps. Intel and the like stress test their flash by cooling it down lol.[/quo

You're right they should be manufacturing these to just make contact with the controller not the flash. cooling the controller is ok, and somewhat necessary with Phison controllers, but cooling the nand flash is a baaaad idea.

 

[luckymatt42]

I got a cheapie Chinese special (anodized aluminum strips for both sides) held together with two included bands. It does the job well and prevents thermal throttling. And, it doesn't look bad at all.

You've had thermal throttling issues with an M.2 drive? You can confirm that the drive performs better after you installed the heatsink? Are you cooling just the controller or the memory modules also?

I'd be very curious to see your testing results, as everything I have ever seen or read says that M.2 drives do not benefit from cooling the memory modules, and even cooling the controller is a bit pointless UNLESS you are doing very large file transfers, in which case the controller can get pretty warm.

 

[stdragon]

I got a cheapie Chinese special (anodized aluminum strips for both sides) held together with two included bands. It does the job well and prevents thermal throttling. And, it doesn't look bad at all.

You've had thermal throttling issues with an M.2 drive? You can confirm that the drive performs better after you installed the heatsink? Are you cooling just the controller or the memory modules also?

I'd be very curious to see your testing results, as everything I have ever seen or read says that M.2 drives do not benefit from cooling the memory modules, and even cooling the controller is a bit pointless UNLESS you are doing very large file transfers, in which case the controller can get pretty warm.

You can read my Amazon review (<-- in the link). Oh, and now on sale for $6.39!

Because I use my workstation for VM testing and database re-indexing, there are times were I absolutely slam my 950 Pro NVMe. It's rare, but when I do, I do!

Most of the time, a 3rd party solution is rarely needed. Most top tier SSDs will in fact include a metal strip in the underside of the sticker affix to all the chips on an SSD. The purpose is to spread the heat around so as to not create hot-spots within the chip. But should the temps rise to 75c even for a moment, throttling occurs until the temps drop again. If you were to benchmark, you would see it drop and plateau with flat performance.

Because of where my M.2 slot is located, I needed a heat-sink to both absorb and radiate the thermals via IR radiation. I'm not sure I've ever heat-soaked it yet, nor do I think it's possible.

Anyways, there you go. A cheap solution for an extremely rare corner case that not even most gamers would encounter. But if you do experience thermal throttling, it can be solved on the cheap

Note: The one I got is single-sided as I didn't have much clearance between the bottom of the SSD and the MB.

 

[Christopher1]

Is it true that flash does better when it is (reasonably) hotter? Does that explain why my USB 3.0 flash drives are kinda hot to the touch when I have used them?

 

[Pompompaihn]

Guys....the side WITHOUT the heatsink is -red-, how much more evidence do you need? I care about my equipment, blue for me, thanks!

 

[stdragon]

Excessive Heat does NOT make an IC perform better. Now, they could be designed to withstand hotter temperatures so they can be clocked faster, but purposefully heating the IC does not inherently add a boost in performance. In fact, as they get hotter, resistance goes up. This can lead to accelerated electromigration between the chip and the interconnects within the chip package itself. Eventually the connect breaks and you end up with a permanent failure.

 

[luckymatt42]

I got a cheapie Chinese special (anodized aluminum strips for both sides) held together with two included bands. It does the job well and prevents thermal throttling. And, it doesn't look bad at all.

You've had thermal throttling issues with an M.2 drive? You can confirm that the drive performs better after you installed the heatsink? Are you cooling just the controller or the memory modules also?

I'd be very curious to see your testing results, as everything I have ever seen or read says that M.2 drives do not benefit from cooling the memory modules, and even cooling the controller is a bit pointless UNLESS you are doing very large file transfers, in which case the controller can get pretty warm.

You can read my Amazon review (<-- in the link). Oh, and now on sale for $6.39!

Because I use my workstation for VM testing and database re-indexing, there are times were I absolutely slam my 950 Pro NVMe. It's rare, but when I do, I do!

Most of the time, a 3rd party solution is rarely needed. Most top tier SSDs will in fact include a metal strip in the underside of the sticker affix to all the chips on an SSD. The purpose is to spread the heat around so as to not create hot-spots within the chip. But should the temps rise to 75c even for a moment, throttling occurs until the temps drop again. If you were to benchmark, you would see it drop and plateau with flat performance.

Because of where my M.2 slot is located, I needed a heat-sink to both absorb and radiate the thermals via IR radiation. I'm not sure I've ever heat-soaked it yet, nor do I think it's possible.

Anyways, there you go. A cheap solution for an extremely rare corner case that not even most gamers would encounter. But if you do experience thermal throttling, it can be solved on the cheap

Note: The one I got is single-sided as I didn't have much clearance between the bottom of the SSD and the MB.

In your specific use case, then a heatsink (at least on the controller) is probably a good idea...but I think you know where I was going with my question. If the use case is gaming/browsing/home use, the cooler is worthless, and the marketing for these products mostly targets the "gamer" audience.

 

[finngrace]

I think some of you are forgetting the main idea of the product, that being expandability over the base ports available on most mainboards. I'd rather stick my money with a reputable brand over an unknown one in terms of an interface between my storage and my mainboard. The cooler more than likely won't need to be affixed, and if it does, you can cut off the TIM to fit just over the controller and not the flash modules. Why does everyone have to be so negative?

 

[RainCaster]

They say this uses the M.2 and the NGSFF interfaces. Which is it? The two are not compatible, and the NGSFF takes 12V which isn't on the DIMM slots.