nvme vs sdd m.2

[watercooled]

The drive in my system will often report temps (I think they're controller temps) of 50-60C in games and under very little load itself (e.g. even when game is stored on another drive).

The temperature of the controller doesn't really concern me given that sort of chip is usually fine to over 90 and will just throttle if needs be. I wonder about the effect on NAND though - from when I tried to look into it, I believe it actually prefers to be a bit warmer, but I'm not sure how it works with thermal cycling for instance. It's probably not a major concern but all else being the same it would be nice to have some full-speed NVMe slots a bit lower down.

[DanceswithUnix]

The M2 form factor is actually not that great for NVME drives due to heat,so its more likely to throttle.But not all NVME drives are made alike,so a poor QLC NVME drive is actually going to be worse in sustained transfers than a decent SATA SSD for example. The problem is people look at headline figures,when sustained performance is what you need to look at.

Compared to being a small pcb on the end of a SATA cable trapped inside a 2.5in fake laptop hdd case so no air can get to it?

Whether SATA drives with no cache/workspace ram or QLC PCIe4 drives that fail to perform you just have to be careful what you buy meets your needs. So far I have mainly specified high IOPS drives, but have built a few PCs with cheap NVMe drives as they are likely to never see harder punishment than booting Windows and running a single application. Not long ago I would have been forced to go with small laptop spinning rust drives to keep the cost down, but there seems a decent NVMe choice these days without reverting to SATA let alone 2.5in format.

The last few builds I have done have ssd "heatsinks" on the motherboard that are more like a heat soak than a real sink, but still unless you are processing video all day it should keep those peak temperatures down. It means I don't need a SATA data cable, and the SATA PSU cable can stay in the modular cable bag.

The MSI ITX board with just an M.2 slot underneath did raise an eyebrow, but thankfully that is one of the light use machines.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The drive in my system will often report temps (I think they're controller temps) of 50-60C in games and under very little load itself (e.g. even when game is stored on another drive).

The temperature of the controller doesn't really concern me given that sort of chip is usually fine to over 90 and will just throttle if needs be. I wonder about the effect on NAND though - from when I tried to look into it, I believe it actually prefers to be a bit warmer, but I'm not sure how it works with thermal cycling for instance. It's probably not a major concern but all else being the same it would be nice to have some full-speed NVMe slots a bit lower down.

The M2 drive on the top mounted slot already runs a bit warm,and that is with a heatsink and good airflow,so the slot underneath has neither,so probably is not ideal longterm.

Compared to being a small pcb on the end of a SATA cable trapped inside a 2.5in fake laptop hdd case so no air can get to it?

Whether SATA drives with no cache/workspace ram or QLC PCIe4 drives that fail to perform you just have to be careful what you buy meets your needs. So far I have mainly specified high IOPS drives, but have built a few PCs with cheap NVMe drives as they are likely to never see harder punishment than booting Windows and running a single application. Not long ago I would have been forced to go with small laptop spinning rust drives to keep the cost down, but there seems a decent NVMe choice these days without reverting to SATA let alone 2.5in format.

The last few builds I have done have ssd "heatsinks" on the motherboard that are more like a heat soak than a real sink, but still unless you are processing video all day it should keep those peak temperatures down. It means I don't need a SATA data cable, and the SATA PSU cable can stay in the modular cable bag.

The MSI ITX board with just an M.2 slot underneath did raise an eyebrow, but thankfully that is one of the light use machines.

The SATA and NVME drives which are not M2 tend to show less throttling,as most M2 PCBs are dual sided,ie,there is NAND underneath which gets no direct cooling,and you can make a SATA enclosure out of metal so it acts as a heatsink. You can see that with thermal pads in the 2.5" SSDs.

I have three SSDs in my system - one which is SATA and holds Windows,and the other two are M2 SSDs just for games at the moment. One is NVME and one is SATA in a aluminium enclosure. Both the SATA M2 and NVME M2 drives run hotter at idle,and the NVME drive has constant airflow over it,and the other two are on the behind of the case. The Windows drive is constantly in use. TPU for example has a useful data point in the Crucial MX500:
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/c...2-1-tb/15.html

They test both SATA versions,ie,2.5" and M2,and the M2 throttled more,but the SATA drives do run cooler.

The heatsinks on top of the M2 drives lack sufficient mass also. My main system is mini-ITX,and I had to spend £150 just to get a motherboard which had one slot on the top.

Also regarding the QLC drives,they can be as slow as HDDs in certain cases - its why I will get TLC drives as there is no price advantage currently.

[DanceswithUnix]

They test both SATA versions,ie,2.5" and M2,and the M2 throttled more,but the SATA drives do run cooler.

Yet their tests showed the M.2 drive to be slightly faster due to its newer firmware, not slower because it over heated and hit a performance wall. They actually said:

You'd have to write around 45 GB without pause for the drive to get sufficiently warm

which ties in with my expectations. I hit my storage pretty hard in my everyday work, and I don't get anywhere close to that.


I have to wonder if your NVMe drive is warm, is the motherboard heating the drive or the drive heating the motherboard?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Yet their tests showed the M.2 drive to be slightly faster due to its newer firmware, not slower because it over heated and hit a performance wall. They actually said:



which ties in with my expectations. I hit my storage pretty hard in my everyday work, and I don't get anywhere close to that.


I have to wonder if your NVMe drive is warm, is the motherboard heating the drive or the drive heating the motherboard?

While the MX500 M.2 comes with a thin metal heatspreader, it is no replacement for a real heatsink. The drive will thermal-throttle to around 300 MB/s when pummeled by non-stop writes for over 90 seconds. Before you panic: this is a rare scenario. You'd have to write around 45 GB without pause for the drive to get sufficiently warm—something that rarely happens. Still, if you often send such large bursts, then the SATA version might be a better choice because it can dissipate heat more efficiently due to its larger form factor. Reads are not affected by this and will always run at maximum speed.

The 2.5" version runs cooler. I actually easily do bigger writes than 45GB.

The fact is if you look at the M2 drives,there are a few problems. Just looking at the PCBs can tell you that. The NAND chips and everything else is all much closer together,and if there is a double sided PCB,the NAND chips on the bottom have no access to a heatsink in an M2 drive. These are the ones which start to overheat,in low airflow conditions, not the top mounted ones I suspect. In the 2.5" drives the PCB is physically more spaced out.

Also I have two SATA SSDs. One is a full sized 2.5" drive,and the other is an M2 in a 2.5" aluminium adaptor case. Both are in the drive compartment which is behind the motherboard. Both have the same amount of cooling air which is zero. The M2 in the adaptor runs consistently hotter,even when idle and not being accessed - the other drive is the Windows drive so is being constantly accessed,so its not idle.

The other M2 drive I have is an NVME drive,which is on the top of the motherboard,with a heatsink. In the mini-ITX case,I have a single 120MM and a single 140MM blow air over the graphics card and motherboard. However,I am using a mini-ITX system,so thermally it is more confined,and it amplifies any differences in the SSDs even more.

The M2 form factor is nice and compact,but its not ideal for thermals. Just like my mini-ITX motherboard is nice and compact,but a full sized B450 motherboard is probably going to have cooler running VRMs as you can have bigger heatsinks,etc. There is no free lunch when you shrink something down,which is at least my experience of ditching full sized builds for 15 years.

It gets even worse with M2 drives,when it comes to some of the faster NVME drives,especially the PCI-E 4.0 ones,you really need to have some proper cooling over them.

[DanceswithUnix]

The NAND chips and everything else is all much closer together,and if there is a double sided PCB,the NAND chips on the bottom have no access to a heatsink in an M2 drive. These are the ones which start to overheat,in low airflow conditions, not the top mounted ones I suspect.

These chips are not only very close together vertically but are tied with copper which is an awesome thermal conductor specially through the power planes of the PCB. So throttle one, throttle all.

But if you look inside a modern 1TB SSD:



it is still a tiny PCB with components both sides. I haven't heard of thermal pads being used to transfer heat to the shell, and many drives have a plastic top shell. They just don't do enough to get hot. The two small screws holding the PCB in place must be doing enough heat transfer!

The 2.5" version runs cooler. I actually easily do bigger writes than 45GB.

That's quite impressive. My usage sees a flat out copy of probably about 5GB at the start which stresses storage, and probably quite a few GB of writes after that but spread out over a minute so they don't really count. Most users don't see my level of usage, let alone yours.

Interesting that they think reads don't generate heat. I'm sure they don't on 2.5in SATA drives, but some of the heat on NVMe is going to be from the PCIe lanes clocking so high and the processing trying to keep up with requests coming in so fast.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

These chips are not only very close together vertically but are tied with copper which is an awesome thermal conductor specially through the power planes of the PCB. So throttle one, throttle all.

But if you look inside a modern 1TB SSD:



it is still a tiny PCB with components both sides. I haven't heard of thermal pads being used to transfer heat to the shell, and many drives have a plastic top shell. They just don't do enough to get hot. The two small screws holding the PCB in place must be doing enough heat transfer!

Yet if you looked at the M2 and SATA PCBs,the M2 has less space between the chips. The plastic shelled models are usually the budget range ones,many now which are lower performance drives with no DRAM - the 860 EVO you linked to has a full metal body. One of the more recent SSDs I dissembled was a Sandisk 480GB which had failed,and it had thermal pads on the PCB. Most will have at least a thermal pad for the controller.

I have bought 8(or was it 10,I lost count) SSDs in the last 18 months or so for myself and others- all the SATA 2.5" ones run cooler than the M2 ones,as I have literally bought in two instances,the same model,but one in M2 SATA and the other in 2.5" SATA dependent on the system. I also use mini-ITX systems too,which are more thermally constrained.

If you look at what TPU said their M2 version throttled. They compared the two models a few months apart. But there is also another thing here. Some of the 2.5" versions actually have more NAND chips for the same capacity from what I have read,probably because of the M2 form factor they are forced to use higher capacity NAND modules.

I have the M2 MX500 myself - the heatsink is just a tiny little thing,and my NVME SSD has the same kind of heatsink.It runs worse than the flat slab of metal heatsink which came with the motherboard. Despite this the 2.5" SATA drive running Windows is idling at a lower temperature,and the MX500 in an aluminium enclosure still idle's higher.

Its even been stated in some recent reviews the M2 form factor is not ideal for PCI-E 4.0 SSDs,as its too bunched together.

Anyway I am getting a bit bored about SSDs now,probably talking more about them now than using them!

That's quite impressive. My usage sees a flat out copy of probably about 5GB at the start which stresses storage, and probably quite a few GB of writes after that but spread out over a minute so they don't really count. Most users don't see my level of usage, let alone yours.

Interesting that they think reads don't generate heat. I'm sure they don't on 2.5in SATA drives, but some of the heat on NVMe is going to be from the PCIe lanes clocking so high and the processing trying to keep up with requests coming in so fast.

If I am batch processing images from RAWs from one SSD to another,and moving data between drives 45GB isn't as much as you think,and my new mirrorless camera does 4K footage,so might start playing around with that. I also tend to manage my game installs on and off. For instance my install folder for Fallout 4 itself varied between 100GB~140GB,plus mod install folders are nearly at 100GB(Vortex).Because of that I keep a mirrored copy of some games,which is frequently updated as its a PITA to redo it all if there is a problem. I tend to mod more than one game - its why I am upto 1.5TB of SSD storage for games and image stuff,and and a few applications,plus 500GB for the OS.

[DanceswithUnix]

If you look at what TPU said their M2 version throttled.

Another day, another SSD that needs to be purchased...

Was reading a review, and thought of this thread. from: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/w...e-sn500/7.html



Not a stellar performing drive, but without active cooling under constant writes it never drops to the performance level of a SATA drive. Amazon have it for £1.73 more than the MX500 SATA.
(with a fan turned on the write performance looks just the same wibbly wobbly running out of SLC cache profile, just at a lower temperature).

[beebub]

I've just gone from an 850 Evo to a 970 Evo Plus, not really any difference in day to day use, I was expecting a similar jump to going from a spinner to an SSD but despite the 970 being several times faster, its just not..

Similar experience. HDD -> SSD was amazing. traditional SSD -> m.2 was "meh, well - it's smaller", and m.2 to NVME was not noticeable in normal usage. Only thing better is copying large files or large amount of files since time is better if you are transferring GBs - however, you are only as fast as your slowest link, so NVME to anything not-NVME... loses that advantage.

[watercooled]

'Traditional' SSD to (presumably SATA) m.2 is just a different form factor, so it's expected that you would see no difference in performance.

M.2 is a form factor that can work in two electrical modes and the slots/drives are keyed differently depending on which standard(s) they can operate in. The two modes are SATA and PCIe. In SATA mode it's no different to plugging the drive into a standard SATA port, and in PCIe mode it's no different to plugging into a physical PCIe slot. You can even get passive adapters to convert between the different physical connectors. NVMe is a protocol that operates on top of PCIe.

[hammy434]

I went from a SATA SSD to a 970 Evo Plus recently and tbh I haven't really noticed much difference in everyday tasks. Nothing like going from HDD to SSD. Moving large files around is much faster though.