- May 19, 2011
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When I needed to do a SSD upgrade on my old PC (Haswell), I chose the 980 PRO + integrated heatsink because the motherboard didn't include the typical 'heatsink' for M.2 SSDs that boards do these days, and I chose a gen4 drive because I anticipated a system upgrade that I would use the drive in (in the near future).
In hindsight I wonder whether getting one with a heatsink was really worth it since it didn't appear to have any great effect on the drive temp (especially considering that system was going to push it to a max of 800MB/sec), but hey ho.
Now for the quandary with is two-fold. New system (AM5) obviously has M.2 heatsinks, but when spec'ing the system I thought that the drive already has a heatsink and I'd simply not use the heatsink that the board came with. I figured I could screw in the M.2 drive like I've done many times before for older systems, however since boards with M.2 heatsinks have become commonplace, the securing point (any idea what it's called?) for the drive/heatsink is designed with the heatsink in mind:

I tried to put a screw in it but it just wasn't happening, so I used the plastic securing bit (that I assume is really just meant to keep the drive in position before the heatsink + screw is used). I've been running it like this since late November 2023 without issues so far, but I'm wondering if it's safe in the long term.
Quandary 2 - the drive passes quick performance tests (e.g. Samsung Drive Magician, or say the Disks utility in Linux Mint), hitting read and write speeds of somewhere in the neighbourhood of 7000MB/sec, but the usual ATTO benchmark that I do on SSDs to make sure everything is basically performing within specs consistently shows signs of throttling (like 90% throttling) halfway through. I mentioned Linux Mint but ATTO is being run from within Win11. I'm using the default NVMe driver, but I've used plenty of gen4 PRO drives in other systems I've built and haven't seen that sort of performance drop-off during an ATTO run.
Surely Samsung's own heatsink is capable of cooling the drive sufficiently under load? I would report drive temps but there are two things that are odd in this respect: One is how variable the 980 PRO temp is, especially despite the fact that Linux doesn't need to read the drive at all (I'll sometimes see say 32C, right now I'm seeing 48/48/54C in psensor). I can make notes of the drive temp during an ATTO run but I don't recall it getting crazy high before the test was completed.
I guess overall I'm wondering whether I should detach the heatsink from that drive and start using the board heatsink, though I am mindful of a guy on imgur who sliced open their hand when trying to take the heatsink off
In hindsight I wonder whether getting one with a heatsink was really worth it since it didn't appear to have any great effect on the drive temp (especially considering that system was going to push it to a max of 800MB/sec), but hey ho.
Now for the quandary with is two-fold. New system (AM5) obviously has M.2 heatsinks, but when spec'ing the system I thought that the drive already has a heatsink and I'd simply not use the heatsink that the board came with. I figured I could screw in the M.2 drive like I've done many times before for older systems, however since boards with M.2 heatsinks have become commonplace, the securing point (any idea what it's called?) for the drive/heatsink is designed with the heatsink in mind:

I tried to put a screw in it but it just wasn't happening, so I used the plastic securing bit (that I assume is really just meant to keep the drive in position before the heatsink + screw is used). I've been running it like this since late November 2023 without issues so far, but I'm wondering if it's safe in the long term.
Quandary 2 - the drive passes quick performance tests (e.g. Samsung Drive Magician, or say the Disks utility in Linux Mint), hitting read and write speeds of somewhere in the neighbourhood of 7000MB/sec, but the usual ATTO benchmark that I do on SSDs to make sure everything is basically performing within specs consistently shows signs of throttling (like 90% throttling) halfway through. I mentioned Linux Mint but ATTO is being run from within Win11. I'm using the default NVMe driver, but I've used plenty of gen4 PRO drives in other systems I've built and haven't seen that sort of performance drop-off during an ATTO run.
Surely Samsung's own heatsink is capable of cooling the drive sufficiently under load? I would report drive temps but there are two things that are odd in this respect: One is how variable the 980 PRO temp is, especially despite the fact that Linux doesn't need to read the drive at all (I'll sometimes see say 32C, right now I'm seeing 48/48/54C in psensor). I can make notes of the drive temp during an ATTO run but I don't recall it getting crazy high before the test was completed.
I guess overall I'm wondering whether I should detach the heatsink from that drive and start using the board heatsink, though I am mindful of a guy on imgur who sliced open their hand when trying to take the heatsink off