m.2 SSD for passive laptop

[Procfessor]

Been trying to decide between nvme or sata.

From what I can scrounge from the reviews it seems I'd run into thermal issues with the pcie drives (even the idle temp seems to be quite high) and the idle power draw of ~1.6W is just attrocious. Has that been fixed since or is that the best the new drives can do?

Due to these 2 problems I'm leaning towards a Samsung 850 heavily and was just wondering if I'm missing something here. Usage will be light, moving around ~10gigs at most at any one time.

Thanks!

 

[coercitiv]

You are indeed missing something, the graph above shows power usage for 2 different power states: "active" idle power for the PCIe drives, DevSleep for the others.

Here's some important quotes from the same review.

Samsung's initial announcement of the 950 Pro specified an idle power consumption of 1.7W, which these drives manage to stay under. Samsung's later specs mention 70mW idle and 2.5mW DevSlp power draw. The former figure is something we hope to be able to verify in the future, but our power meter isn't sensitive enough for measuring DevSlp power.

As stated earlier, the power numbers for the PCIe drives are more of a worst-case scenario, due to our testbed being unable to enable their power saving modes. These active idle power levels have nevetheless been growing with each new PCIe drive from Samsung.

How do you plan to reach thermal throttling limit for these SSDs in a passively cooled laptop? What kind of data transfers do you have in mind?

 

[Procfessor]

You are indeed missing something

Indeed they say 70mW idle but if it's bugged to hell (for over a year now?) then it's as good as nonexistent and have to assume 1.6W, no? That's why I asked if this has been fixed yet.

How do you plan to reach thermal throttling limit for these SSDs in a passively cooled laptop? What kind of data transfers do you have in mind?

I will most definitely not reach throttling temps, however even a 50C idle is too hot for a passive laptop, or so I would think. the m2 slot seems to be quite near the cpu so there would definitely be heat "spilled over".

 

[Procfessor]

Interestingly this article claims a 44mW idle power for the 950:

http://www.myce.com/review/samsung-...6/power-consumption-and-energy-efficiency-11/

That would still leave me with the heat...

 

[Hellhammer]

Idle power is a matter of test platform. Myce uses a tool that is specifically designed for testing SSD power consumption and thus the internal platform supports the low power PCIe states. AnandTech, on the other hand, uses a standard desktop, which unfortunately lacks support for the said power states (mostly due to the fact that idle power isn't usually a concern in desktops).

You haven't mentioned what laptop you have, so it's hard to say how the SSD would impact other components and vice versa. The truth is that SSDs in laptops are typically passively cooled (i.e. no heatsink or direct airflow) and there aren't really any major heat issues. The surface area of the controller is so small that it won't dramatically heat up your lap and if temperatures rise too much the drive will simply throttle to stay within the safe operating temperature. What this means is that you may see degraded performance while doing large file transfers, but in basic tasks the drive won't be under a sustained load and thus won't heat up enough to throttle performance.

 

[Procfessor]

Latitude 7370 (well, waiting for one, can tell you in ~4 weeks). As said my main concern is not the SSD overheating but rather the effetc it has on the system as a whole. According to Dell it has a copper heatsink but since the whole laptop is passively cooled I'd assume there is no airflow over the ssd either to help with the cooling. This is also why I'd think NVMe idle temps would also be bad for me (if one can believe graphs with ~50C). Dell is selling it with NVMe drives too but we all know Dell and thermal management don't go hand in hand...

As for (idle) power let me then ask this simply: would my battery last longer with a 850 or a 950/951 assuming office tasks (eg non-hd intensive workflow)?