Hey there. If you can, you should do this test with the WD Black SN850. It's super fast and gets super hot. It's recommended by many that you absolutely use a heatsink with it. Maybe you'll see better results on that SSD where those heatsinks you have would be much more useful
Thanks for the video, I'm just investigating this topic and the sources are scarce. I have not come to a conclusion yet. One point I disagree with is, that ssd is idling most of the time. I think that there is a lot of writing activity all the time. Even when youre doing nothing, there is a/ background processes doing some small writes all the time and b/ cleanup/TRIM algorithms of the drive itself - including page erases, running in background. Moreover, I do not see a scenario, where the controller actually cools the NAND. At least with my 970pro. Cold storage is relevant for when the system is off, that is *usually* not a problem. From this perspective, the sabrent heatpipes make a lot of sense... the controller heats up the NAND quickly, then keeping some of an equilibrium/compromise at ~50C. The thing is... 970pro gets the controller really toasty at 100C when left uncooled with benchmark loads, so the question is how fast would the heatpipes deal with this king of thermal load and if it is not too much for the NAND. So if you want to throroughly investigate, you can do tests from cold/room temperature with individual/common heatsink. Though the more i look into this, the less I believe there's a silver bullet...
Dude, this was surprisingly in depth and really covered the technicalities of this in ways I never expected. This is legit. I just got a Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus that seems to have heat issues. And even bought that huge heat sink. I really feel like I learned a lot about cooling the controller, not the NAND. Would love to see a tested solution for that. Thanks for all the legitimately solid info! Subbed!!!
Yeah! I just installed a SAMSUNG 980 PRO M.2 and copied 500 GB to it, and is was REALLY hot. It felt hot. Could have been 65°C, I dont know. And I was like... STOP, I need a heatsink. But this was very interessting, having parts that allow different temperatures. Aha. Hm. So, one schon grab small GPU RAM heatsinks and stick it to the controller. Nice! Thank you! So, I will check the temperature after this pause and then continue the copy process.
I live in a tropical country with ambient temps at summer reaching 33 C. Before attaching a heatsink to my Lexar NM610 500GB SSD (inside an Acer laptop), the controller temp would reach 77 C when writing big files, which throttled down the write speed significantly. After putting on a simple copper heatsink with thermal pad, the max temp never went beyond 65 C under any condition. The heatsink was a mere 1mm thick to make sure it fits in the laptop.
That's happened to me. So when I go for nvme in the desktop I just bought a normal heatsink with RGB because I wanted RGB. Still if a simple sheet of copper do the trick then a more bigger heatsink also helps. Maybe aluminum not is the best vs copper but there's more material. Also in desktop having a lot of fans flowing air in the motherboard and heatsinks helps a lot.
Thanks for your thoughtful analysis, honesty and actually talking to normal people and users. You earned another subscriber. I ordered the 1tb wd black, and I panicked after seeing too many reviews of overheating, clearly my kind of use is such as the one you showed and now I feel good about it. Thank you!
Try with a air CPU cooler rather than liquid. It might be able to keep more airflow over the drive (depending on orientation and type of heatsink), which could potentially have a great effect.
i found some old aluminum cpu coolers with large fins, and i'm gonna try that if i can mount those large blocks over my nvme drive in a pci-e adapter; gonna use thermal paste and fasten with cable ties, perhaps; later, if this contraption holds together, it is possible to attach a ventilator to that cpu cooler chunk of aluminum easily;
VERY very interesting and informative. I like the way you approached this, and accepted the ability to learn something new. Making mistakes is a normal part of the process - it's the integrity to lay out your own learning process, that made this as informative as it was. I'm impressed. I don't care how smart you are - I care about how honest you are. Will keep watching.
Heatsink should cover (and cool) both controller and the Flash! This is correct that in idle mode the heatsink may heat the Flash by 3-5C, but in the lower Temp range. However, in operational mode, it will help to reduce the heat from the Flash by 25-35C on the higher range of the Temp.!
Thanks for this video. I've just built a new PC and the Motherboard came with a M.2 mount on the board. I bought a Samsung 970 EVO Plus 1 TB, but wasn't sure about using a heat sink with it. I phoned the Tech Department of the local company I bought everything from and they said not necessary, as Samsung don't recommend it. Having found your video, it basically confirms what my local supplier said, so I am now going to install the SSD onto the mobo and install Windows 10 Pro, as the mobo doesn't support Win 11. Cheers, Russ. UK.
Idle states - exactly how does this slight increase in temperature (due to heat distribution from these sinks) damage one's data? There certainly must be a window of heat levels that is considered "safe" for these drives and in particular, idle states. Which chips benefit from heat sinks - interesting point made on your part. Perhaps a heatsink that is really two distinct physical sinks in one is needed for the two identified types of chips reference in your video.
I think many are going to be misled by this video (and many older 2018/2019 videos) that are referencing cooler running Gen3 drives. Even the SN750 ran hotter than its competition, but the SN850 (Gen4) takes that to a new level. Depending on mobo layout, these hotter Gen4 drives are often stuck directly under the GPU, which only makes a hotter running drive get even hotter. That said, the real reason I watched this video - I wanted to know if the included Aorus heatsinks were functional. And it certainly seems they work, so that was good to see.
Useful video bro, Many thanks for the digging and efforts. I had Samsung Magician installed to keep observing the temp of the Samsung 870 NVMe SSD and the idle temp is always around 42 to 45c max. and while multi-tasking or stressing the laptop, it reaches 61 to 65c but that is only for around 15min and then back to 50c or less. all without a heatsink and of course that's at summer days, during winter, these temps are even lower. I will try using a laptop cooler that i have it laying around, it may be useful cooling the whole system at summer days.
I have samsund 970 evo ssd and samsung magician too, it shows only temp of ssd, it doesn't show controller temp, use aida64 or something like that to monitor that. if your ssd 40 your controller must be 50-60, if your ssd 60 your controller must be 70-80 ( according to experience with my ssd).
Ok so now that I know that heatsinks are kind of useless, do you think I can put an rgb heatsink just on top of my ssd to get the extra 25fps from the pollution light? Without applying the thermal thingy on the actual drive I mean. That way I can keep the guarantee sticker Ty, and great vid man! :)
It's only useless if you apply the thermal pad on the wrong section on the m.2 drive. I found that the NAND part on my m.2 drive is a bit taller than the controller - this causes the controller didn't have any contact with the heatsink. So I cut the thermal pad only to touch the controller, leaving the NAND bare, now my m.2 drive runs much cooleer.
Solid channel man. I really like your style of editing and the general vibe of the channel. Very straight forward, good lighting, good music, and you have a nice voice. Keep it up.
Thank you sir. I am very happy that I have watched your video before hitting the purchase button on Amazon. I have been using two NVMe on my PC but there is no problem.
Great video. Given how inexpensive the Pelote is, you could trim the heatsink down so that it only covers the controller. Then, the nands are fee to operate cool and warm as normal.
@@01Minecrafter10 the issue with this method is that airflow is reduced by the heatsink so I guess just sticking a small heatsink on the controller could be an option. I've seen the warranty void if removed on the ssd stickers tho...
I bought a little aluminium finstack with a tiny fan. I got it because my new 990 pro was placed directly above the 3090 and was getting past 50C which my 970 pro evo never got close to. Now I only see 42C max. I’m happy with it.
If it should be cooled then why wouldn't the manufacture take any steps to cool it or recommend a cooler? It seems odd that the truth is so obfuscated. I would just contact the manufacture.
I don't use heatsinks at all on my two NVme drives. I do make sure that I have good airflow and that my case inside temperature sits at around 30 degrees C.
Belated reply. I was 'hunting' around for views about heatsinks and just watched your interesting programe. I was about to put a copper heatsink onto my mini PC M.2 ssd. I think I will now cut it to a small size to just put on the controller part. I'm only doing it because the computer tech people said my mini PC does not have a fan and it does seem to get hot.
im glad you did some research, but in my opinion your length of time on endurance read/write tests isn't enough to conclude or justify anything, aside from that,.. its not just tlc or the qlc chips runs better in rising temp while other 'the controller' runs bad while hot, the controller throttle controls the amount of read / write rate allowed based on thermal detected, another words higher the temperautre lower the performane it becomes...at .critical level controller disallows any read/write io activity until temperature drops until safe level... so yeah heat sinks are always good, it helps to take away heat from controller and distribue to greater surface area to dissipate the heat and its fins, thermal pads are ok but i personally prefer generous amount of thermal paste. i've witness things so i know. 😉
Wouldn’t it be better to keep the heat sinks, but make them separate? Like a heat sink per chip. That way the residual heat from the controller won’t heat up the nand?
So in my Asus Rig Strix G17 (2023), I installed 2 x 2TB SSD and I figured out: Without heatsink it goes up to nearly 80°C With minimal Heatsink (cant use bigger ones in Laptop sadly, I could reduce the Mx temp to about 65°C testing with Benchmarks. So I would say that it is really worth it
Thanks Nick, l run my Samsung 1TB 980 Pro with heatsinks attached, motherboard covers removed, though, ensure they are cooled, independently by a fan, as low temps are critical for performance and longevity😊
good video, good camera, good microphone, really liked it. It really seems like it was all for nothing, but at least you educated us. and you did a nice job at that
What do you think of the idea of cutting the heatsink with a metal saw, leaving a 2-3mm gap between the parts, one part on the controller IC, and the other(s) for the NAND? So the heat from the controller will not be transferred to the NAND.
Great content and well thought out, thank you. The MTE article is a good read as well. I am not going to use a hs on my second nvme and mine is not right under gpu and is indeed in path of fan air.
I agree it's totally optional, but my findings with using a cheap amazon heat sink is that the nand got 1c hotter but the controller drops 20c!!! underload. Granted it never got to throttling, but it sure got close. These drives are expensive & heat kills components, so why not drop $20 to extend the life a bit is my view.
It's funny, my first Windows PC was a 486, which just had passive cooling. It had 30-40 square blocks on the heatsink, no CPU fan lol. As manufacturers shrunk transistors on the CPU, each transitor uses less power, but they're packing more and more in every chip. It's not very different with SSDs really.
In my tested running crystalmark on a drive with no h/s, you get close to the drives expected speeds (often more). Now run it a second time, whilst the drive is still hot. Notice a "slight" speed decrease. Now run it a third time, the drive is even hotter maybe close to its max running temp, notice the speeds are around a 1/3 of what the drive is capable when cooled properly. One thing I noticed, my test with a drive with no heatsinks, they not only idle a lot lower than the drives fitted with heatsinks, but the drive also didn't peak as high temperature wise, and also returns back to a lower temp much faster than those drives fit with a heatsink. Finally worth mentioned, is that not all m.2 drive placements are equal. Even worse if you have a slot lower down and use a GPU in a vertical position. It seems this area behind the GPU is a little heat trap and I saw temps around 7C higher on these port with the GPU mounted vertically. In my opinion, a single standard heatsink might not be the best solution, and a different one might work better depending where the drive is mounted and how the GPU is mounted. It isn't as a cut and dry as mount a drive and put a heatsink on it. p.s as I am writing this on the test machine, the drive with no heatsink that peaked about 58C is now sat at 46C. The drive with a h/s which peaked around 72C is currently sat at 65C that is over a time span of 17 minutes and 30 seconds....
This nvme m.2 heatsink works for me, before i used this my ssd max temp could reach 63°C. After i installed the cheap $5 aluminum heatsink, with full load (crystal disk mark test) max temp decrease to only about 49°C.
there is an additional thermal pad included in the box for single sided nvme drives.. you need to paste that extra thermal pad on the already pasted thermal pad to fill the gaps
One good thing about SSD heatsinks is that they distribute the heat evenly among all components they cover - and prevent isolated location temperature spikes. That is more important than keeping everything cold as much as possible, given that silicon is generally fine long term in temps under 60 celsius. In simple words: do not worry about keeping everything as cold as possible - in fact temperature shocks and large temp deltas are not good for your hardware either as they cause component physical expansion and shrinkage on the PCB board. Just make sure you avoid > 60 celsius spikes on all chips on your ssd and keep the temperature as stable as possible - use an all covering, well sized, well ventilated heatsink.
I would of found it interesting if these tests were done inside gaming laptops....Just to see how much closer the temps get to critical in a far more congested and enclosed space with the heatsinks (or pads more likely) On my omen the copper coverplates inside the laptop have only half of it with a preinstalled thermal pad which tells me they are of the same mind to only apply to the controller.
The video you showed - passive heatsinks using metal conduction. Do you have another evaluation, this time with active heatsinks (i.e. fans like the the iStorm)?
Hi Nick, thank for you elaborate research. By the way I read in another forum that testing with infrared thermometer will yield the lower result compared to the ones from internal algorithm....... so im confused which one to trust.......
As long as they are consistent with each other you could just calculate the differences if you would rather use the infrared thermometer. I suspect that the surface of the SSD is slightly cooler than what will be read on the internal sensor.
We just purchased a bunch of ASUS mini-PC's for our office users and they have a 1TB M.2 in them, which I saw when I opened one up, and they have no heatsink. In fact, where they are positioned, I doubt a heatsink would fit and still allow the case to be closed, but apparently, ASUS doesn't think it needs a heatsink or I'm sure they would have included one at the factory.
I have watched and read countless videos and articles and have concluded that cooling only the controller is the proper method of cooling a M.2 Drive. Great video!
@@DoNotSayThree Not really, you could use GPU Memory Heatsinks that have thermal double-sided adhesive. Note to use a "Rubber-band" ring that should be warped around the heatsink and M.2 drive to prevent the heatsink dropping off the m.2 controller chip. I ended up going with "M.2 Heatsink Cooler 2280 SSD Double-Sided Heat Sink with Thermal Silicone pad for PS5/PC PCIE NVME M2 SSD" from a online store. The reason I went with that was because it allowed me to cool the back of the drive by allowing me to use a thermal pad and it was not a clearance issue with that heatsink installed. To top it off it was cheaper then getting a pack of GPU memory heatsinks.
@@DoNotSayThree The PCIe slot card is a great idea if you got a slot to spare. Keep in mind that some motherboards share PCIe lanes with other devices/chipset on certain PCIe slots. Try to use a slot that has nothing else tied to it. Also, it does not matter if you plug in a 4x PCIe card into a PCIe 16x slot. Hope that helps out!
Umm.. Yeah, Your conclusion is way incorrect sir. It is always in your best interest to use heatsinks when every you can in the way they are intended and "Designed" to be used! I think you confused yourself when referring to someone else's research . The only time the SSD was hotter with the heatsink vs without was at "IDLE" and it wasn't by much. A drive at idle is a computer at idle which means the case cooling system is at idle as there are thermal thresholds. The controller will always be hotter than the Nand in normal operating conditions as it's is like a mini processor directing traffic to the Nand(s) at high rates of speed. You should NEVER use less thermal pads/paste then what a product is designed for! The whole purpose of thermal pads/paste is to spread the heat out evenly throughout the heatsink. By removing any portions you could in fact create the OPPOSITE effect causing the SSD to get even hotter in the places where you removed the pads/paste. When is comes to the "SABRENT" heatsink, you clearly didn't read the instructions that came with it! The heatsink is designed for both "single" and "double" layer SSDs. You were using a "single" layer and if you would have read the instructions you would have realize the "extra" pad that came with it was to be used by doubling up the pad on the bottom of the heatsink which would have closed that gap you had and the heatsink would have preformed much better! People, keep in mind that we are talking about a "HEATSINKS". A heatsink is designed to pull heat away from or out of an object and direct it away from said object. In this case the heat is directed towards the top of the heatsink and from there needs to be cooled in some kind of way for the heatsink to continue to do it's job. Any heatsink that does not come with it's own fan or is designed for liquid cooling relies SOLEY on you CASE FANS to keep it cool! Your computer case needs proper in/out air flow to your motherboard and components regardless if you run Liquid cool system otherwise devices in your case and/or on your motherboard can fail do to extreme heat or being subject to "constant high temps".
With the SABRENT M.2 2280 SSD Rocket Heatsink you can drell the screw holes to screw slots, so it make contact with the nvme chips. I also rigged up acouple of 120mm fans blowing air over the motherboard, one angled at the M2's on my mobo an one angled at the VRM's. Rememer meccano is your friend as is a dremal. Edit: for refferance i have the Gigabyte X670 GAMING X AX ATX .
So the solution, with those heatsinks, in case you have bought them already is to place thermal pad on top of the controller only and balance the heatsink so it doesn't touch the nand chips.
wait what? im getting mixed signals, you said for gaming you want the nand to be as cool as possible which means you want the thermal tape touching it , then you go on to say only let the thermal tape touch only the controller. so confused now
Good info and data. However, personally I disagree with your conclusion - the 2 degree difference in controller idle temps is completely inconsequential and 42/44C are both perfectly fine, however the difference under load is meaningful - NAND temps are in the 60s C under load with heatsink, and optimal NAND operational temp is ~50-70C.... so definitely use a heatsink based on the other site's data, for both controller and NAND. The 94C+ NAND temp under load achieved without a heatsink is not optimal.
Also the transfer of heat from the controller to the nand is something I have noticed with heatsink. The nand is kept ever so slightly warmer and max temp is what appears to have been cut off at the knees. Since they share in the same heatsink and thermal pad. A lot of people go to the effort of cutting up the thermal pad but I think honestly it works ideally with one. You keep the nand slightly warmer but the controller never overheats. Max temp or nand and the controller are kept well in check.
I have bunch of 970Pros, and the coolest running one has NOTHING on top of the chips (Controller, NAND, DRAM). It is attached to a heatsink at the *back-side* only, and the top side is just open, with some airflow. This is using a Vantec UGT-M2PC130 PCIe x4 Low Profile Adapter. Just some food for thought.
Very nice video, I do have to say though if one was to cut the pads off of the motherboard heatsink it would be very difficult to get replacement for at least my mobo. It appeared to be thicker that your normal pads. It has been a while since I installed one so I could be wrong but it would be something to keep in mind before hacking it up..
Because sometimes prebuilts don't come with those extra mobo M.2 support pads, you can always remove pads entirely and fall back to buying one of those $10 standalone sandwich heatsinks, instead of using the mobo heatsink. Oftentimes they work better than the mobo heatsink too.
Sabrent didn't get much love, but, looking at the chart, it was 10-15 degrees cooler vs no heatsink, and cooler than almost everything else... rare time it was beat, it was only by 1-2 degrees... am I reading the chart wrong? Video made it sound like it didn't do very well.
The concussion in most tests is you don’t need an heatsink. Most even the most expensive just hold the heat in the heatsink it’s self giving false readings. Or do nothing at all.
My Tuf Dash F15 With 970 evo plus 2TB and Adata S40g 4tb have 12.8 wk thermal tape under controller chips between the drive and laptop motherboard. Asus actually have diagrams where to put thermal tape for both drives...the motherboard itself acts as a heatsink. Still saw the 970 hit 67 C under load....on D2 temp...A data stayed around 40C
I like watching your videos during painting. I pretend like you're in the same room as me, talking gibberish and painting as well.... like old times :)
my 970 evo without heatsink and with a professional heatsink get to 70C degrees when running a stress test. so i've made my own and now the max temperature is 55C. :'D
Nice content straight to the point. I have a rog strix g15 with Ryzen 7 6800 RTX 3050 8 GB Ram and 512 ssd, I want to upgrade ram and ssd, should I buy ssd with or without heatsink?
Cool test Comparison:) HWINFO64 has 2 temps the nand chips and the controller. And yes the nand chips is used in the Samsung software. I use the Samsung 960pro HWINFO64 showing the controller between 54C/69C win11 22H2/22621.963 And the nand is always stable since I use this M.2 drive. nothing more than 43C I learned that if there are errors on the drive it gives more heat so checking the drive is always a good thing....(chkdsk) And don't use windows default drivers.... thks
i hv asus tuf z690 wifi d4 motherboard. i wana populate my four m.2 slots . which one i shud buy among 2tb 970 evo plus or 2tb 980 pro P.S. 980 pro lacks the nvme driver unlike 970 evo plus
@@CaptainScorpio24 not sure about the 980 pro, but either way don’t get the 970 evo plus, especially the newer version with the elpis controller. That thing is notorious for running hot even for a gen 3 nvme. If you’re looking for a gen 3 nvme with decent temps then you might like the sk hynix p31 gold. Although it’s lacking in the software department.
Classic youtube, i was looking for information about SSD heatsink, since its my first time using M.2 NVMe and i worried it will add a heat inside my PC and long story short i just whatever and i bought one and just knowing that there's heatsink for it and apparently its hotter than regular SATA. And then this video came out and gladly its not a bad news XD
Enjoy now because in a few years a HD won't be needed as MS, Apple and even Linux are discussing booting from flash drive from the manufacturer and that will replace your boot drive and the OS is cloud based. Like a dumb terminal and all your software and private Data is on the cloud. Basically can you say goodbye "Personal Computing"...well, it was a fun ride. Let's see, I'm 61 now and started with this in 1980. So, yeah..it was a fun ride.
In my country ambient temp is quiet high. Idle usually sitting at 70°c. Raid 0 gen4. Already bought non heatsink because of cheap. But regret cause i need because it on back side of Mobo. Gigabyte x570i.
I have a problem that I can't figure out. Just bought a Rampage VI Extreme motherboard and it has thermal pads with some cellophane over them which says 'remove'. The problem is that if you remove the cellophane, the thermal pad is sticky. The thermal pad is attached to a motherboard screw-in heatsink, so if I remove the cellophane, the thermal pad will be sticking to both the heatsink and the SSD. So how can you then take the heatsink off if it's stuck to both surfaces? Was hoping for your input please.
I have found that the surface that sticks to the ssd is not so sticky that you will have issues removing it later. I have removed the motherboard heatsinks several time and they do stick to the ssd but it's soo weak that it comes away freely with almost no force. i hope that helps.
@@TechIlliterate Thank you - I was so worried about this I didn't install the SSDs in case I couldn't get them out again without damaging them. Much appreciated.
So is it worth spending some money on a heatsink if you are only going to get 20 degrees temperature cooler? Probably not is what I got from this video.
Just courious, I want to know what you thinking. How about using ic heatsink for every chip instead of using 1 block heatsink for everything.. that will help (maybe a little) with heat without transferring to another chip.
Thanks. After a year of taking up space, I threw out the box for the motherboard for my Grandpunk's PC. The M.2 heatsink with it. I'm adding an M.2 to her machine today and wondered if I need a heatsink. Since she spends about 90% of her time watching RU-vid and just a couple hours a week playing co-op games with me, I'm thinking I'm fine with no heatsink. If I need one in the future, I'll probably cut one to fit the controller only. This was a very useful video.
NAND is too hot will lead to failure to cool can lead more wear. actualy to store it its the simplest as cool as possible like room temps or little below.
Thanks for this video, very informative and helpful. If I can ask - I just installed 970 evo plus (gen 3), would you recommend taking the sticker off before adding heatsink? I prefer not to take it off, so it won't lose its warranty.
@@MixedArarash In my case, I've tried using heatsink, but it did little to no difference in temp, so I removed the heatsink and it's working great without it. Kept the sticker though (the one on the ssd itself)
Exactly.point on. The memory is rated in meantime (hours) reading/writing has a life span. The controller life can be extended by cooling, but heat to a (ahem, degree), is necessary for error recovery, etc.. but I'm in the same mind, leaving the memory alone and cooling the processor. Good job on explaining. I really need to put a hamster and squirrel cage in my computer.
I just bought a best buy brand heat sink and my 970 evo plus dropped 10 degrees and didn't budge when I ran benchmarks. My 980 pro is just using my motherboard's heatsink and its running at 40 degrees.
