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)
Discussion (19 replies)
Join Discussion →50% compared to...
Also, it's quite large, not gonna work with every setup.
50% compared to no cooler presumably.
But why? It won't make it faster or better.
Agreed. I have no doubts it would work well, but the functionality isn't for everyone.
Look at the size of that thing. And what does it realistically provide? Lower temps sure, but does that matter any? Not like nvme's were holding back the turbo boost bc of temp levels?
As I recall, some parts of NVMe drives - like QLC flash chips - actually need to run a bit warmer.
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.
I don't doubt that they can.
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.
Idle Temp (C)
Warning Temp (C)
Critical Temp (C)
[/TR]
Samsung 980 Pro 2TB
49
82
85
[/TR]
Sabrent Rocket 4.0 (Phison E16) 2TB
46
90
95
[/TR]
Samsung 970 EVO
36
85
85
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
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?
Excellent point.
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:
[URL unfurl="true"]https://web.archive.org/web/20211121114904/https://spectrum.ieee.org/flash-memory-survives-100-million-cycles[/URL]
(the Wayback link bypasses the annoying paywall)
In regards to the CPU style cooler: yeah, no. Just plain no. If/when they need more aggressive cooling there are so many other alternatives.
WHOA, there is an M.2 slot on the underside of the motherboard!!!
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.
Drastically increasing the size of a heat sink reduces the temperature of the device its being used on? Yeah, seems likely but that's less impressive when it would have clearance issues with a lot of setups. Not to mention, it will probably be less aesthetically pleasing than the heat sinks that usually come with the motherboards.
Yea I stuck with the heatsink that came on my Corsair drive. I figured they know what they are doing.
Yeah, they'll slap those things just about anywhere these days.
What a PITA to get at though. I'm still surprised we haven't seen many vertical risers for them.
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 hate when people use "percentage reduction" when referring to temperature. celcius and Fahrenheit zero is completely arbitrary and different from eachother, which makes "percentage reduction" completely arbitrary.
I suppose if you use Kelvin it has some better inherent meaning.