There have been multiple reports of PCIe 5.0 SSDs using Phison E26 controllers shutting down after reaching high temperatures during testing. According to ComputerBase (via TechPowerup) numerous SSDs using the Phison E26 controller will shut off instead of throttling after reaching certain temperature thresholds. These include models from Adata, Crucial, Gigabyte, and Seagate. Now in keeping things in context, it should be noted this was seen during testing when not using the stock coolers or being placed under a motherboard’s cooling cover or other cooling solution, essentially just leaving said NVMe M.2 type drives exposed without any added cooling. A Phison CTO has previously said in 2022 that future M.2 SSDs could need active cooling and this at least in part seems to be true now.
As more reports of PCIe 5.0 SSDs using Phison E26 controllers continue to be gathered by hardware reviewers there is one manufacturer leading the pack in addressing this issue. Corsair had already made a new firmware update available that institutes thermal throttling, a common industry solution for addressing SSD overheating that has gone back over multiple generations. TechPowerup saw the Corsair MP700 fail in its review, but along with other reviewers have noted that the update has fixed this issue. Seagate has attempted to address this issue as well with a firmware update for its FireCuda 540 but testing has, unfortunately, shown it to be ineffective. Hardware Luxx also saw in its review of the FireCuda 540 that it would shut down but then their colleagues at Computerbase re-tested it with the new update and it still failed.
Update from ComputerBase on September 12 (machine translated):
“The topic doesn’t seem to be as important to the other manufacturers as Corsair. Neither Adata nor Gigabyte and Seagate have a corresponding firmware update as of today.
A reader pointed out to the editorial team that Crucial has now released the new firmware version PACR5102 for the T700 SSD. But a check in the editorial office revealed no change in behavior: If the temperature gets too high, the T700 simply switches off.
According to the brief release notes, the update from PACR5101 to PACR5102 only brings improvements to an error handling algorithm.”