M.2 drives are known for their superior speed, compact size, and ease of installation. They also offer high storage capacities, with newer drives available at 4TB and higher—for instance, the MP600 PRO LPX 8TB is now available.
It's worth noting, that these drives are sensitive to heat and overheating can cause performance drops. Every generation of SSD increases the processing speed and capacity of these small drives and as the drives increase in performance, the controller and other components have to work harder to keep up. The biggest challenge as we pursue faster and better technology is maintaining efficiency so that the the SSD does not overheat.
So, as we continue to evolve SSDs to make them faster and more efficient, managing heat is an increasingly important factor.
One obvious solution here is to use a heatsink to keep the SSD cool. Since the M.2 form factor for SSDs has become so popular, many motherboard manufacturers have included heatsinks for SSDs. The only problem with many of those heatsinks is that sometimes they are not properly designed to support the heat generated by newer M.2 SSDs. This is why SSD manufacturers have started to offer drives with heatsink and fan cooling options. Such cooling solution are specifically designed for the drives in question and will prevent it from throttling under normal loads.
Now that you understand that M.2 SSDs must be cooled to keep them running effectively and efficiently, let's discuss heatsinks a bit. Heatsinks have been in the industry in one shape or another from pretty much the beginning. A heatsink is essentially a piece of metal that makes contact with a chip and helps to spread the heat over a larger area using a chunk of alloy, or in many cases aluminum. You'll find heatsinks (and fans) are used on pretty much all modern CPUs and graphic cards, as well as for helping keep VRMs, memory chips, and a myriad of other devices cool. Heatsinks are an effective way of keeping components in your PC running cool. But how cool is cool enough?
Now, most of the time, a heatsink is effective enough to keep your SSD cool, but as speeds and capacities increase, greater heat is generated. One thing that happens with M.2 SSDs is that thermal throttling can kick in. Thermal throttling is a technology designed to protect SSDs from poor data retention caused by overheating and when the thermal throttling mechanism kicks in, it lowers the performance of the SSD in order to prevent the SSD from becoming affected. In order to prevent thermal throttling on newer faster drives, a fan is used along with the heatsink. I'm sure everyone is familiar with fans and what they do but basically when accompanied with a heatsink, the fan simply cools the heat extracted by the metal. This is probably one of the best solutions besides a water cooling option to cool the M.2.
So, what are some of the challenges with the fans? A possible issue here is that fans produce noise, and no one wants a noisy PC. Rest assured that the CORSAIR MP700 PRO fan is quiet. In testing, it has proven to not only be effective at keeping the drive from throttling, but it is quiet too. Quiet enough to be hard to pick out from the other components found in a normal gaming PC.
If you find yourself in the market for a new M.2 SSD, the new CORSAIR MP700 PRO is certainly worth considering. You can find the CORSAIR MP700 PRO with Air Cooler in 1TB and 2TB configurations available at launch with the 4TB option coming in the near future. The drive is also available without any additional cooling or with a Hydro X Series water block for integration into a custom cooling loop.
Here are the SKUs currently available:
PRODUCTS IN ARTICLE
