Is cooling necessary for an M.2 NVMe SSD?

The short answer is yes. The slightly longer answer is it depends. We can follow this up with plenty of question like: What else you have in your system? How good is your PC's airflow? What PCIe generation are you running? If you're in any doubt though, keeping your drive cool is not going to do any harm. At least not if the drive operates within its designed limits.

Just as with every other component in your PC, your M.2 NVMe SSD is designed to operate within a specific temperature range. Whether that requires additional cooling depends on how good the airflow is in your system, but for most drives it should be easy to configure your system so that your SSDs are running optimally.

Your motherboard is a key consideration here, as modern motherboards ship with cooling for M.2 SSDs as standard, ranging from heatspreaders to full-on cooling solutions in their own right. At the very minimum you're looking at a simple heatsinks that sit on top of the SSD, with some form of thermal material that helps transfer heat away from the drive. For the vast majority of M.2 NVMe SSDs this kind of cooling is more than sufficient to keep the drive operating optimally.

Of course, if your M.2 NVMe SSD ships with its own cooler (e.g the CORSAIR MP600 PRO XT) then you should use that if possible.

Your SSD's operating temperatures can be found on its specifications sheet. You'll find the specs for CORSAIR SSDs on the corresponding webpage—just look under the Tech Specs tab. For instance, the CORSAIR MP600 PRO LPX shows that is has an operating temperature of between 0°C and 70°C (which is fairly standard for M.2 NVMe SSDs.) If it runs between those limits, you won't have any problems.

This naturally leads to the next question: How do you find out how hot your SSD is running? There are several ways of checking this, but the easiest is to use the software that ships with your SSD. For CORSAIR SSDs you should use the CORSAIR SSD Toolbox. The current drive temperature is displayed on the main drive information screen.

As an aside, this temperature range is defined by the flash memory, as the SSD controller is happy operating at much higher temperatures—often well over 100°C in fact. Still, checking your drive temperature in your SSD software will give you a good idea of how it's running.

As long as your drive is running within the recommended operating temperatures then you've got nothing to worry about. If it's getting toasty, then ensure that you've installed your motherboard's M.2 SSD cooler correctly. Alternatively, look at improving the airflow within your machine by buying a few more fans, such as the iCUE AR120 Digital RGB kits.

It's worth noting that cooling demands for the newer drives has increased. The second-generation PCIe Gen4 SSDs, such as the MP600 PRO XT, and the latest PCIe Gen5 offering, such as the CORSAIR MP700, require better cooling than first gen PCIe 4.0 SSDs. You can't run these drives optimally without a heatspreader, so make sure you have something.

Finally, note that operating outside of those temperature limits shouldn't have any long-lasting impact on your drives. If an SSD gets too hot it will throttle the performance, which means you won't hit the throughputs the drive is capable of. Once the temperature returns to a safe level though, it will perform optimally once again.

In summary: your M.2 NVMe SSD does require cooling to operate optimally, but the cooling provided by your motherboard should be sufficient.