Gen5 NVMe have active cooling

[BFG10K]

Consumer PCIe Gen 5 Gaming SSDs Arrive For Sale In Japan At A Smoking 10GB/s

The first PCIe 5.0 SSD popped up in Japan with a familiar face and blistering performance.

hothardware.com

A fan on an SSD? This is really getting quite ridiculous. These things are turning into GPUs.

 

[Muadib]

The price is what I found to be ridiculous. $385 for 2TB makes it a hard pass for me.

 

[Shmee]

Yeah, seems silly. If heat is a problem on PCIe gen5 m.2 drives, maybe we should get them in u.3 format instead, and use an adapter?

 

[coercitiv]

Yeah, seems silly. If heat is a problem on PCIe gen5 m.2 drives, maybe we should get them in u.3 format instead, and use an adapter?

To me it looks like a half-baked product using a reference design that was probably aimed at showcasing performance and sorely lacking power optimization.

Here's pics of the two products, try to tell them apart 🙂

 

[mxnerd]

Solid State cooling. I guess not cheap.

 

[BFG10K]

Video of fan noise:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1622081740973158400

At this rate Gen6 will need CPU tower coolers and Gen7 will need watercooled Rads. We're heading in the wrong direction, folks.

To me it looks like a half-baked product using a reference design that was probably aimed at showcasing performance and sorely lacking power optimization.

Except it looks like Corsair's Gen5 will do the same.

Corsair Accidentally Reveals MP700 PCIe 5.0 SSD, Running at 10 GB/s

Corsair has teased its fastest PCIe 5.0 SSD yet in an M.2 form factor. The company published some initial details about its upcoming product in a short video. However, the video has been taken private, indicating that the launch date may be at a later stage of the year. Thanks to Overclock3D, we...

www.techpowerup.com

 

[mikeymikec]

I've always wondered why my 980 PRO with Samsung heatsink idles at 50C, double the temp of the 840 PRO also in my system. IMO it screams inefficiency.

At this rate, M.2 is either going to get replaced pretty soon or there's going to be a revision that allows for mounting M.2 heatsinks to/through the motherboard, IMO.

 

[igor_kavinski]

They are gonna have to decide pretty soon that double sided mobos are the only solution to a lot of these problems.

 

[q52]

I'm still using gen 3 m.2 and have yet to hit a real world usage that saturates it's bandwidth

Don't see the point of these things for consumers

 

[biostud]

One of the reasons I'm skipping the first generation of Gen5 nvme drives.

 

[Oyeve]

Looks like another point of failure.

 

[BFG10K]

Looks like another point of failure.

And noise. It's as lunatic as fans on the motherboard or in a monitor. You hear apologists say "it's so quiet you can barely hear it!". Nah, the issue is it shouldn't be there in the first place. As those tiny fans age they get louder with high-pitched whine.

Each NVMe generation jacks up sequential speeds which are meaningless unless all you do is copy files all day or have a very niche I/O workload. 4KQ1 read (which actually matters) is at best 2x - 3x better than the first SATA2 SSDs. Contrast 50x - 100x improvement over HDDs from the first SSDs, which is where the tangible difference comes from.

The vast majority of workloads won't show a lick of difference between these furnace NVMe drives and original SATA2 SSDs.

 

[utahraptor]

After thinking about this for awhile I think these over the top coolers are there to ensure they don't get picked on by reviewers who may try to run these open air in a mobo that does not have at least a built in cooling solution. The sales sheet on the Gigabyte version that has the large passive heat sink for instance indicates it is optional and that a built in cooling solution is ok to use. I think if they shipped these bare and got reviewed without any cooling solution the numbers could look very unfavorable, but this is not a realistic use case as most people buying such a new and high end product is unlikely to run in that way.

 

[aigomorla]

I still remember reading that you don't want nands to be kept cool.
The controller yes, but the nands you want a little on the hot side.

 

[igor_kavinski]

I still remember reading that you don't want nands to be kept cool.
The controller yes, but the nands you want a little on the hot side.

Wow. Didn't know that.

Does cooling the NAND chips on an SSD negatively affect its reliability?

The problem of heat dissipation in high-performance, small form-factor SSDs is well-known, for example, the paper Transient Thermal Analysis for M.2 SSD Thermal Throttling published in 2018 17th IEEE

electronics.stackexchange.com

The paper Influence of temperature of storage, write and read operations on multiple level cells NAND flash memories from 2018 shows the following graph, which suggests that writing to flash cells at a temperature of 25°C or lower results in earlier problems at reading compared to writing at 85°C.

That could be one reason why metallic Sandisk USB flash drives run so hot. Maybe they are trying to ensure that data retention doesn't become an issue due to writing to cold NAND.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

Seems to me we need a new motherboard & case standard. Wouldn’t a lot of this be solved by changing the placement of the drives and at least have a possibility of a case fan blowing on it.

 

[igor_kavinski]

4 Gen5 M.2s: https://www.club386.com/asrocks-blazing-quad-m-2-card-delivers-pcie-5-0-storage-on-steroids/

 

[BFG10K]

I still remember reading that you don't want nands to be kept cool.
The controller yes, but the nands you want a little on the hot side.

You want hot NAND when writing to it but if it's hot all the time, long-term data retention can suffer. Regardless, if the controller is throttling you can have a massive performance hit far more than any cold NAND would cause.

All this talk of temperature prompted me to check my 970 Evo Plus (Gen3), and it turns out it's an absolute furnace. 55c-59c idle and easily hits 60s just with light browsing and desktop work. I can't even finish a single run of ATTO without it throttling to half speed.

GPU/CPU idle in the high 30s and that's with fan-stop on the GPU and idle CPU fan speed, so it's not a case or ambient problem.

Multiple people online are reporting the same issues. I ordered an el-cheapo heatsink so I'll see how that goes.

 

[aigomorla]

Regardless, if the controller is throttling you can have a massive performance hit far more than any cold NAND would cause.

Yes i know this very well from all the external USB nVME adapters which throttle to infinity and beyond that don't have a active fan on them.
But i think i read somewhere nands like to be at around 60C-85C and its not bad at all for them that we assume to be.
But Controllers do not like to get hot, so its like trying to balance sweet and sour on the same stick without pissing either side off.

 

[igor_kavinski]

But Controllers do not like to get hot, so its like trying to balance sweet and sour on the same stick without pissing either side off.

They could make heat resistant controllers but I'm sure they don't want the extra costs associated with doing that. They are doing the same thing now that HDD makers do. Keep a backup. We ain't responsible for you losing your stinkin' data, even if WE cut costs to reduce the reliability of our product!

 

[coercitiv]

Gen5 drive without the active cooling emerges. Granted, it trades the fan for RGB lights, so two steps forth and one step back 🙂

SSTC PCIe 5.0 SSD hits 10GB/s speeds on Intel and AMD platforms - VideoCardz.com

SSTC preps Tiger Shark SSD with PCIE Gen5 support A storage company from Vietnam is set to launch its first PCIe Gen5 storage very soon. The first samples of the new Tiger Shark SSD have just been sent out for reviews. This is next-gen storage based on PCIe Gen5 interface and NVMe 2.0 protocol...

videocardz.com

Board design is very similar to the ones at the start of the thread, so we'll have to wait and see if thermals are an issue or not.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Hopefully the heat will kill the RGB LEDs 😀

 

[mikeymikec]

You want hot NAND when writing to it but if it's hot all the time, long-term data retention can suffer. Regardless, if the controller is throttling you can have a massive performance hit far more than any cold NAND would cause.

All this talk of temperature prompted me to check my 970 Evo Plus (Gen3), and it turns out it's an absolute furnace. 55c-59c idle and easily hits 60s just with light browsing and desktop work. I can't even finish a single run of ATTO without it throttling to half speed.

GPU/CPU idle in the high 30s and that's with fan-stop on the GPU and idle CPU fan speed, so it's not a case or ambient problem.

Multiple people online are reporting the same issues. I ordered an el-cheapo heatsink so I'll see how that goes.

Huh. The 970 Evo Plus's I've been using often even without heatsinks have been like 35C idle.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Huh. The 970 Evo Plus's I've been using often even without heatsinks have been like 35C idle.

Maybe your case has better airflow. Do you have a GPU in that PC? In my mobo, I went with the M.2 slot without the heatsink but now it's covered by the 2.5 slot GPU. It's Crucial P5 so no serious issue so far but I'm sure it must be toasty.

 

[mikeymikec]

Maybe your case has better airflow. Do you have a GPU in that PC? In my mobo, I went with the M.2 slot without the heatsink but now it's covered by the 2.5 slot GPU. It's Crucial P5 so no serious issue so far but I'm sure it must be toasty.

Often no GPU (ie. Intel integrated graphics). I wonder if that might explain my 980 PRO's temp, being near/above my R9 380X (in the same case, a 2.5" SATA SSD has a temp of about 25C).