How hot do NVMe SSDs run in the real world?

[camner]

I should say at the outset that my concern is NOT about thermal throttling or running too hot for the NVMe's own long-term good. My worry is more down-to-earth...

My (home office) work environment tends to run warm, particularly in the summer. The last thing I need is to have another device that's going to throw off a lot of heat and make my summer work environment even less comfortable than it can be at times.

I have the choice of a SATA SSD in an existing JBOD enclosure, or putting together my own external NVMe SSD + enclosure. The SATA SSD is going to run much more slowly, obviously (perhaps at about 25% of the i/o speed of the NVMe?). But it will generate a lot less heat, no?

Do NVMe SSDs generate much heat at idle or when doing lighter work such as reading or writing smaller (say <1GB) files, and heat up only when doing a lot of i/o all at once, or do they just run hot all the time? My current (too small) SATA SSD doesn't seem to get more than a little warmer than ambient temperature no matter what I do it (during sustained writes, for example).

I'd love the performance of an NVMe drive, but not at the expense of contributing much to my office temps.

 

[Erehy Dobon]

Here is my recent experience from a couple of systems.

I have a custom built Windows gaming PC that has two m.2 NVMe slots. The first one is an ultra speedy Gen4 slot; I have a Sabrent Rocket stick installed with Sabrent's own over-engineered heatsink. That m.2 drive has never once gone beyond 49°C.

There's a second m.2 NVMe slot on the same motherboard; this one is Gen3. That slot is populated with an ADATA SPG8200 stick using the included heatsink. That drive stays at 40°C even during periods of heavy access (particularly reads since I keep most of my games on that drive). I monitored these on a couple of the hottest days of the year and presumably the ambient temperature inside my PC's case was at its peak. There's ample cooling from the machine's fan which actually has a low-noise adapter affixed because I don't need the full cooling capacity and I prefer a quieter system.

I have a Gen3 Sabrent Rocket in a cheap external m.2 enclosure. Today I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy my Mac mini 2018's internal system drive to the external device. It never got beyond "warm", probably 35°C during the disk cloning process which is a constant full load.

I think my 6th generation iPod touch generates more heat than this external m.2 enclosure.

It's not like these devices are 1200W hair dryers.

 

[wardie]

I think what you are actually concerned with it not how “hot” the devices are but how much “heat” d they generate into your environment? These are different things.

In a nutshell, devices like this generate minimal heat. Take an example of a high end Kingston card. A high performance KC2500 NVMe PCIe SSD 2TB. Look at the power consumption, as it physically cannot emit more heat than it consumed.

So max it uses 7W and thus that’s about the same as one very bright LED house light, or maybe 10% of an old filament house bulb. So basically it is tiny contribution compared to many other things. Is that helping?

003W Idle / .2W Avg / 2.1W (MAX) Read / 7W (MAX) Write

KC2500 NVMe PCIe SSD - Technical Support - Kingston Technology

Find FAQs, datasheets, warranty information and downloads for the KC2500 NVMe PCIe SSD

www.kingston.com

 

[Fishrrman]

OP wrote:
"Do NVMe SSDs generate much heat at idle or when doing lighter work such as reading or writing smaller (say <1GB) files, and heat up only when doing a lot of i/o all at once, or do they just run hot all the time? My current (too small) SATA SSD doesn't seem to get more than a little warmer than ambient temperature no matter what I do it (during sustained writes, for example)."

My experience with 2.5" SATA SSDs is like yours. That is, my SATA SSDs never seem to get very warm.

HOWEVER...
I have an nvme blade SSD mounted in a USB3.1 gen2 enclosure (an Orico), and it DOES get "hot" under heavy write loads (I use it as a backup drive).

In fact, I even tested it and it got hot enough under extreme writes to "throttle back the speed" and slow down to a crawl. Let it cool down, and the speeds went back up.

I'm not a technical expert regarding nvme, but I seem to recall reading that the technology (disk controller?) includes a feature that will "throttle back" write speeds under high heat so as to preserve the integrity of the data writes.

Perhaps others reading will correct me if this is a wrong assumption.
Perhaps it depends on the drive itself, or the enclosure, or how the two react together.

Having said that...
I think it's worth trying the nvme drive in your situation.
For just "boot and run" usage, it will probably do fine.

 

[camner]

It's not like these devices are 1200W hair dryers.

Your comment aboit the 1200W hair dryer led me to think that my initial thoughts were wrong, and that
what matters is how much heat energy is produced by the device rather than how hot it gets. My thought experiment last night was to imagine two different electrodes, one about 1mm square, and the other one gigantic, lining the walls of my 12’ x 12’ by 8’ office. Apply 10W (what I thought I read in the specs of one NMVe blade) to each electrode, and assume that all of that 10W would be converted into heat. Both of these electrodes would provide the same energy into heating the room, but the giant electrode wouldn’t even be noticeably warmer, and the 1mm square electrode might cause a 3rd degree burn if touched (I really don’t know how hot it would get, but if an NVMe stick can get to 90°C...).

Then, this morning, I read this...

I think what you are actually concerned with it not how “hot” the devices are but how much “heat” d they generate into your environment? These are different things.

...

So max it uses 7W and thus that’s about the same as one very bright LED house light, or maybe 10% of an old filament house bulb. So basically it is tiny contribution compared to many other things. Is that helping?

This pretty much cemented things. Thanks to all for your replies.

 

[Erehy Dobon]

Look, the main concern about heat generated from m.2 NVMe SSDs is how the device functions.

If these things run too hot, they thermal throttle resulting in crippled drive performance. All of the heatsinks, monitoring software and cooling strategies are meant to maximize device performance.

In that sense, they are no different than the CPU in your computer or mobile device.

This is the same with fancy AIO liquid coolers in PCs vs. air coolers vs. passive cooling. Keep the device cool enough so it won't thermal throttling during sustained loads.

No one really cares about how much heat an iPhone contributes to their living room or bedroom. People care whether or not the device is too hot to run at peak performance.