JiuShark has announced the M.2-Three, a new M.2 SSD cooler that the Chinese PC components manufacturer claims can reduce temperatures by over 50%. The design of the M.2 SSD is notable in that it looks a lot like a typical CPU air cooler, coupling a 74.5 mm base with a tower heatsink that features 27 fins and a single heat pipe. Rounding out the unit is JiuShark’s optional 6610 fan, which can be mounted on either side of the M.2-Three with traditional fan clips. A cooling performance chart shared by JiuShark demonstrates how well the M.2-Three might cool a Samsung 980 PRO PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD (500 GB), with the top bars showing Flash NAND temperatures and the ones below showing the SSD controller temperature. JuiShark’s M.2 Three cooler is available with either a blackened heatsink (~$13.30) or bare aluminum (~$8.80).
JuiShark’s marketing spiel is that, as M.2 drives get faster, it is all the more important to keep them sufficiently cool for the sake of performance and data integrity – or something along those lines – as we had to rely on machine translation of the official blurb.
Elsewhere in the construction of the cooler, JuiShark has used a stainless steel retainer mechanism to secure the cooling device to the SSD. It is a kind of tray design with four screws to secure everything in place. Though the whole device looks like a substantial construction, it is surprisingly and not reassuringly light at 113g in total. For reference, a budget classic tower CPU cooler like the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo v2 weighs 662g.
Source: Taobao (via Tom’s Hardware)
Recent News
Also, it's quite large, not gonna work with every setup.
But why? It won't make it faster or better.
Thing is, there's not really a standard for any of this, and many motherboards come with 'heatsinks' that hide and provide some cooling to M.2 drives already. And then you have massive GPUs that make accessing M.2 drives as they are difficult, let alone would prevent the installation of one of these tower heatsinks in most viable M.2 locations.
Adding a cooler usually has that effect.
Too bad there is usually a GPU in the way.
Also, is m.2 temperature really a problem?
I have three m.2 drives in my system, a Samsung 980 Pro, a Sabrent Rocket 4.0 and a Samsung 970 EVO, and I've never seen any of them even get close to their critical temperature thresholds.
I don't know what the temp looks like under load, but according to SMART data none of them have ever spent any time exceeding either Warning or Critical temps. I can't tell if they have ever thermal throttled though.
I'd do a load test, but I'm not sure what a good one would be. Suggestions?
The 980 Pro and the Sabrent Rocket are both installed under the motherboards included heatsink/heat spreader. I made sure I had good contact with the thermal pads so that the heat is transferred to the heat spreader.
The 970 Evo is installed in an m.2 slot on the back of the motherboard. When I installed it, I made sure I added a thick enough thermal tape that it made contact with the motherboard tray, to help pull off any heat. It is unclear how much of the lower temp of the 970 Evo is due to this, and how much of it is due to the fact that it is an older Gen 3 design, compared to the other being Gen 4.
Either way, with current m.2 drives temperatures just don't seem to be a huge problem, unless maybe you have very poor airflow in your case, or if you have other hot components dumping heat on them. The fact that I lead my heat out of the case using water cooling may help.
This may change with Gen 5 devices?
Counterintuitively, write endurance of NAND flash is improved at elevated temperatures during the device's active (powered-on) state — up to a certain point. I don't know where the sweet spot is for the current generations of NAND; the papers I have are rather dated. There is of course the issue that the controller enjoys cool weather. ;)
Conversely, data retention is inversely proportional to temperature during storage in its powered-off state.
Tangentially related, I'm reminded of the following from a decade ago:
Flash Memory Survives 100 Million Cycles
I've seen in reviews that some PCIe 3.0 drives like the ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro will throttle writes when they hit 70ºC, but this doesn't affect reads.
That's not the strangest place on this motherboard there are m.2 slots...
There is a weird slot on the motherboard called DIMM.2, which utilizes the same physical slot as used for RAM, but with a blocking bar so you cant install RAM in it. Instead the slot has PCIe lanes wired to it. It is intended for installing a DIMM.2 expansion card, that has three m.2 slots in it.
So, between the three on board m.2 slots (two under the motherboard heat spreader, and one on the back of the board) and the three slots in the DIMM.2 riser, there are 5 m.2 slots on this motherboard.
Then I guess I could add more by sticking those 16x PCIe to 4 m.2 slot risers in here as well.
I love all the PCIe lanes on the Threadripper.
I suppose if you use Kelvin it has some better inherent meaning.
I just grabbed mine from the box (not currently using it) and while I could have sworn there were two slots on one side and one on the other, it turns out I was wrong. Just one on each side.
I will say this though, having recently had to pull out one of the SSD's under the motherboard heat spreader, requiring me to remove my NIC, and my GPU and thus break into my water loop (thank the good lord for QDC's) this DIMM.2 slot is certainly more accessible, making it easier to replace M.2 drives...
The one on the bottom of the motherboard? Yeah that one is probably in there semi-permanently. I don't look forward to removing the motherboard to take it out. That's why I installed that one when I built the system rather than use the second slot on the top. I figured if I want to add another m.2 drive over time, I'd rather have it be one on the top, not one on the bottom.
Edit: oops, didn't see that Zarathustra just posted about one but from ASUS.