Since when did my SSD need water cooling?

As the latest generation of M.2 SSDs have trickled out to consumer platforms we've seen some wild and wacky cooling solutions strapped to them: heat pipes, 20,000 rpm fans, and even tiny liquid coolers. Perhaps the most extreme example we've seen so far is Adata Project NeonStorm. It packs a self contained liquid-cooling …

[teknopaul]

"while it's true that the latest generation of SSDs really are running hotter, Crucial doesn't yet see the need for active cooling for its drives."

Current tech you need to pretty careful about boxing them up and airflow. Writing from Spain where room temp can be above 30 already.

[Anonymous Coward]

Also often motherboards place m2 sockets so that the SSD is going to be underneath the GPU which may add heat to the situation

[Roland6]

Under the display adaptor/GPU and PCI slots seems to be a preferred location for the primary and secondary M2 SSDs, so not only potentially warm but also little to no headroom for a sizeable heat sink/cooler…

Also we shouldn’t forget many modern laptops have very limited space and airflow over the M2 SSD…

[MrDamage]

You're lucky to get an M2 and not soldered eMMC these days.

[harmjschoonhoven]

Speak louder, I could not hear you

What? No spinning rust?

[phuzz]

Re: Speak louder, I could not hear you

Only if the watercooling leaks onto the fan

[Richard 12]

Re: Speak louder, I could not hear you

Less spinning, more splattering.

[gnasher729]

At the moment I’m transitioning from HD to large, slow, cheap SSDs. Much slower than fast SSDs. Much faster than fast HDs in normal operation. Much much cheaper than fast SSDs at the same size, or much bigger.

Apple used to sell “Fusion” drives with 128gb ssd and 2 or 3tb HD. I think it’s time for the same with 256 or 512gb super fast and 2, 4 or 8 tb slow. I like a bit very fast storage, but most of it need not be fast.

[squigbobble]

SSHDs aka hybrid drives

Seagate and Toshiba used to make them but they stopped in the last couple of years now that SSDs are competitive for large capacity storage.

[VicMortimer]

Re: SSHDs aka hybrid drives

And they were unbelievably awful. I don't think more than about 10% made it past the first year, I haven't had one get past warranty yet.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: SSHDs aka hybrid drives

Yup, only SSHD I ever encountered was in my sons laptop and that was because I had to replace it for him when it failed after a year or so.

[Filippo]

Re: SSHDs aka hybrid drives

I have one in my laptop, and it's crap. I don't use it very much, otherwise I'd have tossed it already. I don't know what performance it was supposed to get, but in practice, for my workload at least, it's only somewhat better than a HDD, and sometimes it freezes outright for entire seconds, I guess when it has to do a big swap or something.

I think the OP was talking about a hybrid where a part of the drive is a fast SSD, and another, larger part is a slow SSD. I'd be up for that if it meant no active cooling.

[Binraider]

Re: SSHDs aka hybrid drives

I fear you may have been given the bargain basement end of the spectrum... Definitely not representative of what's possible.

[gnasher729]

Re: SSHDs aka hybrid drives

Apple used two separate drives. So the logic needed is part of the OS, uses the full power of your computer, instead of being run on a tiny hard drive controller. I think that makes a difference.

Same reason that I wouldn’t trust full disk encryption on a drive, much better to leave all the logic, handling keys etc. to a proper computer.

[FIA]

I think it’s time for the same with 256 or 512gb super fast and 2, 4 or 8 tb slow. I like a bit very fast storage, but most of it need not be fast.

This how a lot of the large capacity slower SSDs work? They have a chunk of fast flash to soak up writes and give decent speeds, but once you get past that they're not actually that much faster than spinning rust. (at writing... seek times obviously still get you on HDs).

Problem is, larger (cheaper) drives use multi level cells which are slower to write. They're now getting to 4 bits per cell. Allows more data to be packed in the same space but is slower to write. Around the 70MB/Sec mark.

A lot of this is masked by having a smaller chunk of faster flash to soak up any writes but if you fill this write performance tanks.

If you're buying one of these for storing games or large media, situations where you're mainly reading rather than writing, it probably doesn't matter in the slightest.

Unless you have very specialised workloads with modern desktop computers it's latency that kills you, rather than out and out speed.

Modern OSs need low latency random access to be usable.

Years ago I put OSX Lion on a HD equipped mac that was a little too old for it. It was awful. It lagged, the busy cursor was my constant friend. Then I changed the HD for an SSD and it was night and day difference. The machine became usable again. The reason, the OS was build for machines that usually had SSDs, it was just doing too much random background I/O for the HD to keep up with. The SSD didn't care.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Modern OSs need low latency random access to be usable."

So "modern" OSs are badly written and just get by because they know we have bought yet more high-spec hardware they can squander? First they ate all our RAm and we let them, then they ate all our CPU cycles and we let them, now they're trying to eat all our i/o bandwidth and we will let them.

Just imagine what our computers could do for us if they weren't burdened by all this "modern" stuff.

[FIA]

To be fair an OS should be using all the RAM for file caching, and background CPU usage makes sense. Our desktops/phones are getting more interactive, that instant search feature needs to build it's indexes somehow. The updaters need to run, and all the spyware/tracking we put up with for our free Windows need to run too. ;)

So long as it gives the RAM and CPU back when needed then it's all good.

[Orv]

I think people's expectations have changed, too. It used to be I'd start Windows booting and then go make a cup of coffee, then come back right around the time the login screen came up. Now it's done before I can leave the room. People now would never put up with how much time we used to spend waiting for disk loads. Splash screens were invented just to break up the monotony!

[gnasher729]

i tried to find out through Google how exactly QLC cell SSD drives work. My impression was that the same cells can be used as either fast single bit or slow quad bit cells. So if I get this right, then there is no fixed "fast" memory. If 1.96TB of your 2TB drive are full, then you have 40GB QLC cells remaining which can be used as 10GB fast single bit cells. If 1TB is full, then you have 1000GB QLC cells left that can be used as fast 250GB single bit cells. (The documentation that I found says that the amount of fast memory goes down as your drive fills, which doesn't make sense if it is fixed size).

Interestingly, everyone tells you an "up to" speed but nobody tells you how much data you can write at that speed. So I have no idea if that "up to 3,100 MB/sec" drive slows down to 60MB, and when.

[phuzz]

Depending on what you're doing for your storage, you can probably add an SSD cache to your spinning rust at the OS level.

I was doing it via Windows Storage Spaces*, but these days I have a seperate NAS running unRAID, with a couple of 512GB SSDs as a write cache. IIRC ZFS can do something similar.

(* SSD caching in Storage Spaces isn't avaliable via the UI in consumer versions of Windows, but you can still set it up via PowerShell)

[Ozan]

So do we really need that speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

No…. …but people like to brag.

I recommend waiting for a couple of years and this spec will be entry level…

[Kevin McMurtrie]

Yes, if you're occasionally using it for swap and caches. I'd rather wear out a fast SSD in 2 years than buy 512 GB of DRAM plus a motherboard that holds it.

[Hardrada]

"...heat pipes, 20,000 rpm fans, even tiny liquid coolers."

I've obviously been sleeping under a rock - since when did anyone put a *20krpm* fan in a computer? That's the upper end for jet bypass fans for goodness sake.

[b0llchit]

That's the upper end for jet bypass fans for goodness sake.

SSD: Please add fuel

You: Ok, here you are

SSD: See ya! (PC takes off and is never seen again)

[A Non e-mouse]

Maybe it's to do with the small fan size on an SSD?

[MrDamage]

Anyone who has been inside a room filled with 1u switches and servers with their little fans screaming their heads off, should have the tinnitus to prove how fast those little buggers can spin.

[TimMaher]

What’s the worst sound in a rack room?

No sound at all.

Mine’s the one with the air conditioning proof collar. Turned up.

[Richard 12]

This.

It's going to be a maximum of 20mm diameter to fit the form factor, so will need to spin very fast to move a useful amount of air.

Which also means it'll be pretty noisy.

I want my PC to be fairly quiet, and I don't think I'm in the minority.

[Orv]

10Krpm fans have been common in 1U servers for about 20 years, now, so I'm not too shocked. I remember finding the shrapnel inside the cases when one would have a bearing failure and the blades would hit the casing.

[PRR]

> when did anyone put a *20krpm* fan in a computer? That's the upper end for jet bypass fans

As A Non e-mouse says: size matters. Pretty much, rotating things with similar Diameter*Speed will have similar stresses and pumping ability.

So 20mm at 20,000RPM acts like say 80mm (3.5") at 5,000RPM or 16" (406mm) at 1,000RPM. And 16" is like a car radiator fan. These traditionally spin at engine speed, which is likely to be 3,000 to 6,000RPM when cooling is needed. (Big truck fans will run 2/3rd that RPM at 1-1/2 times the diameter.)

Airflow will tend to go with swept area, or as diameter squared.

Noise at a given size rises very quickly with RPM. You would like an over-size fan turning slow. Ceiling fan? However in modern PCs and laptops we demand small size.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just asking ...

... just a gimmick playing on gamers' ignorance or irrational love of unicorn barf?

Hmm ...

I take it we're just being rhetorical, right?

.

[TimMaher]

Re: “unicorn barf”

Isn’t that nice and glittery and smells like freshly baked biscuits?

[Cybersaber]

Re: Just asking ...

Why not both?

[DS999]

Hopefully like CPUs

These drives can throttle if they are pushed hard enough that they begin to overheat, rather than cook themselves to death

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Hopefully like CPUs

RTFA!

"Go a little too hot — say 80°C — and things become problematic, however. At these temps, you risk the SSD's built-in safety mechanisms forcibly powering down the system to prevent damage. However, before this happens users are likely to see the performance of their drives plummet, as the SSD's controller throttles itself to prevent data loss.

The latter is one of the reasons why even during the PCIe 4.0 generation it wasn't uncommon to see aluminum or even copper heatsinks sold alongside premium models."

[ocelot]

I notice when backing up to a 512GB WD SSD in a small metal case that it maintains a high transfer rate and then drops to a crawl when it gets hot to touch. Leave it to cool down and the transfer restarts ..

So I think the problem exists for even quite mundane SSDs

[gnasher729]

That’s most likely not due to heat. It seems that the latest cheap drives (including big cheap drives) have cells where you can write either one bit very fast or four bits very slow. So during normal operation your SSD writes to the fast area and later copies it to the big slow area. If you write too much in one go that is done before you are finished, so things slow down. That this happens when the drive is hot is coincidence.

[Pascal Monett]

I was going to say that I'm sure I agree with that, but actually I'm pretty sure I disagree with that.

I have a Maxtor 2TB external SSD. In normal use (aka working) I rarely have any issue with it because it is my large data drive, aka don't use it very much. However, when I do a full on backup or restore of the data, I have to put it on its side because, if I leave it flat on my desk, it heats up to the point that it basicall loses connection to the PC.

If it is on its side, it remains cool enough to complete the transfer procedure without issue.

So no, things slowing down when hot is not just a coincidence.

[RedGreen925]

"NAND flash actually likes to be 'hot' in that 60° to 70° [celcius] range in order to program a cell because when it's that hot, those electrons can move a little bit easier,"

Apparently need to put a heater on mine they never get above 40°C...

[Alan Brown]

The controllers prefer to be below 40C, so cooling those is worthwhile. Several heatsinks only touch the controller and avoid the nand entirely

[firstnamebunchofnumbers]

Progress

My favourite feature of M2 drives is how much surface area they take up on a motherboard. Especially, on a recent Asus board, that to replace an M2 drive I had to remove three expansion cards and associated cabling, undo 4 screws to remove some plastic decorative cover to then get access to the disk.

Why sit them flat on the motherboard and not vertically like RAM? Or just use the fact that they take out PCI lanes and have them on expansion cards by default.

[Smirnov]

Re: Progress

On HP's z4 G4 (and I suppose on the G5 as well) the M.2 slots (z4 G4 XEON machines have two, Core i versions have one) are located on the right side of the mainboard (toward the front of the PC) so that the SSD protrudes outside the mainboard area (it's essentially side-by-side with the mainboard). This way it doesn't take away mainboard space for other components (or slots) and, because the SSDs are now directly behind the front fan they see good airflow.

Despite this, I still don't use the M.2 slots in my z4 G4 as my SSD is a U.2 SSD mounted on a PCIe adapter.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Progress

Have you tried upgrading anything in a laptop recently - a year or so back I was "volunteered" to put a replacement battery that a friend of my wife had got as the original in her laptop was no longer holding charge - I was told she couldn't becuase she didn't have the right screwdriver. Naively I assumed this meant I needed to take a philips scredriver, take out a couple of screws, unclip old battery, clip in new battery, do up a couple of screws. Turned out I nneed to remove ~15 screws, improvise with a knife to seperate the top and bottom halves of case (hadn't brought a pry tool with me(, disconnetct several cables with exremely deliicate connectors, remove some more screws, lift up motherboard, swap the battery then reassemble (followed by a disassemble and reseat the cables again as first time track pad no longer worked). The days of laptops with access panels on the base to replace memroy, battery, ssd/hdd seem long past for the mainstream .... at least my other son's clevo based laptop still had a removable panel to access the SODIMMs when I upgraded his RAM a few months back"

[J. Cook]

Re: Progress

Yup. Even lenovo's infamous T series require the same tool kit as you'd need for cracking a phone open. It doesn't have to be that way. The next machine I'm going to purchase will likely be a Framework, because it's easy to open to replace or upgrade bits.

[that one in the corner]

Re: Progress

> Why sit them flat on the motherboard and not vertically like RAM?

Cheaper that way (my mobo has a vertical slot for another SSD but then I need to buy the support bracket) and, as mentioned in the article, they can fit under the expansion cards, in between the PCI sockets. Vertically they either stick up out of the mobo, held on the sghort end, just waiting for you to twang them like some rather pricey musical instrument or we'd need new sockets designed to hold them firmly oriented like RAM sticks are.

> Or just use the fact that they take out PCI lanes and have them on expansion cards by default.

You can do that, if you want; such expansion cards are available, some of them allow for quite humonguous SSD arrays to be installed. There was a time before SSD slots were common on mobos and such expansion boards were required. But it is cheaper not to. And, as the article notes, you get shorter traces the way things are.

[A Non e-mouse]

Re: Progress

Why sit them flat on the motherboard and not vertically like RAM?

Maybe there's a potential issue with mechanical stress on the connector? Especially if the mobo is mounted vertically.

[Dale Mahalko]

Re: Progress

You can unbury a motherboard M.2 slot with a flexible extension cable.

Sintech 20cm M.2 NVME extender on Amazon. Use foam double stick tape to mount it on the case:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DZCCGJN

LTT did a video where they make a 3 meter PCI Express bus extender.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5xvwPa3r7M

M.2 is the same bus, though a really long extender ribbon cable would likely need a outer foil shield connected to the chassis ground to minimize electromagnetic interference.

[ComicalEngineer]

If I get this right then, I can also use my PC to brew up a nice hot cup of coffee using the SSD?

Now that would be useful.

[meanioni]

>>If I get this right then, I can also use my PC to brew up a nice hot cup of coffee using the SSD?

Now that would be useful.<<

Just watch out for latte-ncy issues :-)

[DMahalko]

SSD controllers need cooling, not so much the flash

SSDs are more than just a cluster of flash cells. There is also a controller chip that queues up blocks of cells to be erased and prepared for writing again.

The controller is severely thermally limited in consumer devices which is why it's recommended to leave a large percentage of free space, for handling short bursts of writing gigabytes of new data. It takes a long time for a consumer grade controller to erase blocks and if you use up all available flash that is ready for writing, speeds will crash and you have to wait for the controller to slowly erase new cells.

The SSD flash controller is the main difference between different tiers of enterprise SSDs that talk about DWPD or Drive Writes Per Day, also referred to as Read-Intensive (slower) or Mixed-Use (faster). These SSDs run very hot to provide high write speed all the time, with air blowing over it constantly in a server or storage array chassis.