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> ~10W Controller. Doesn't matter on a Desktop or Server. Of course it does. For one, that's heat you have to efficiently remove or face SSD throttling back on

> ~10W Controller. Doesn't matter on a Desktop or Server. Of course it does. For one, that's heat you have to efficiently remove or face SSD throttling back on you or degrade over time. It does not make sense to buy expensive hardware if it is going to show impaired performance due to thermal throttling. This makes the business of putting together your PC this much more complicated, because up until recently you only had to take care about CPU and GPU and everything else was mostly afterthought. We are already facing motherboards with their own fans, now I suppose it is time for SSDs.

dragontamer 5y ago
Weren't 10,000 or 15,000 RPM hard drives like 15W or 20W or something? These 2U or 4U cases, or tower desktop cases, were designed to efficiently remove heat from storage devices, as well as the 3000W++ that the dual socket CPU and 8way GPUs will pull. 10W is tiny for desktop and server. Barely a factor in overall cooling plans.
- lmilcin 5y ago
  They were, but 3,5" drives are large hunks of aluminium with many times the surface. Meaning that as long as you have some airflow around them and the air is not too hot they are fine. Also the heat was mostly generated by motor and an actuator and not the controller.
  - zamadatix 5y ago
    High performance m.2 drives come with removable finned heatsinks for this reason. Without them they rely on throttling during sustained heavy workload. Dissipating 10 Watts in a desktop isn't the concern.
    - baybal2 5y ago
      The thing is the flash chips themselves are relatively cool. It's the controller that gets most of the heat from running PCIE at top speed.
    - Matt3o12_ 5y ago
      The heatsink doesn't really work, though, and is marketing for the most part [1]. I have a crucial P1 NVME SSD and I can make it overheat pretty reliably. Pretty much any synthetic workload makes it overload if the SSD is empty (it reaches 70° pretty quickly and even starts throttling until it reaches 80° and the whole system starts shuttering because of extreme throttling do it doesn't damage itself. Although I have not properly tested it, it seems that not using any heatsinks from my motherboard makes the temps actually better but it still overheats. The main reason it can overheat quickly is probably because its sitting in a really bad position where it gets close to zero airflow despite being in an airflow focused case. Most motherboards place the nvme slot directly under the GPU. The main problem seems to be that the controller is overheating when it's writing at close to 2000 MB/s. It's also important to note that only the controller (an actual relatively powerful ARM processor), not the flash memory, seems to overheat. Fortunately, this is mostly not an issue because it's a QLC drive and the workload is unrealistic in the real world. When writing to an empty drive at 2000MB/s (Queue depth 4, 128k sequential writes), it takes 2 minutes until the cache is full. The way its currently used, it takes 30 secs for the cache to become full and for write speeds to drop to 150MB/s. The only way it has every overheated in the real world was during the loading screen of a gameplay when it reached 78C quickly (and I only noticed it in the hardware monitor). If the GPU hadn't heated up the nvme drive before (it was sitting at 65C mostly idle), and starved it for air, I doubt it would have hit 60C. So until motherboards start placing nvme where it can get some actual cooling, or they make actual functioning heatsinks, their power usage can make a difference. [1]: https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/2781-msi-m2-heat-shield-increases-temperatures https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/2781-msi-m2-heat-shield-i... but there are many more articles/forum posts with similar issues.
      - zamadatix 5y ago
        The Crucial P1 is a budget SSD that doesn't come with a proper heatsink, similar in quality to that god awful "heat shield" in that linked review. When I say "High performance m.2 drives come with removable finned heatsinks" I mean an actual high performance drives that come with a finned heatsinks like https://www.amazon.com/Corsair-Force-MP600-Gen4-PCIe/dp/B07SQZYW2V/ https://www.amazon.com/Corsair-Force-MP600-Gen4-PCIe/dp/B07S... not examples of budget drives paired with flat pieces of metal. Also your high performance SSD should be going in the direct-to-CPU slot to the right of the GPU, not under it.
- hermitdev 5y ago
  I had a 10k RPM SCSI 3.5" HDD in my desktop 20 years ago. I don't remember the power draw, but it got hot enough to the touch to burn flesh. I ended up rigging a case fan to blow directly on it to keep it reasonably cool. Neither case nor motherboard were intended for that drive (mid-tower Dell home case of the era). I even had to solder the fan directly to the missing pins on the motherboard.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
Would be cool to have a general liquid cooling solution for all components. We'd install a radiator outside our homes just like an air conditioning unit and then connect the computers to it.

dragontamer 5y ago

Weren't 10,000 or 15,000 RPM hard drives like 15W or 20W or something? These 2U or 4U cases, or tower desktop cases, were designed to efficiently remove heat from storage devices, as well as the 3000W++ that the dual socket CPU and 8way GPUs will pull. 10W is tiny for desktop and server. Barely a factor in overall cooling plans.

lmilcin 5y ago
They were, but 3,5" drives are large hunks of aluminium with many times the surface. Meaning that as long as you have some airflow around them and the air is not too hot they are fine. Also the heat was mostly generated by motor and an actuator and not the controller.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  High performance m.2 drives come with removable finned heatsinks for this reason. Without them they rely on throttling during sustained heavy workload. Dissipating 10 Watts in a desktop isn't the concern.
  - baybal2 5y ago
    The thing is the flash chips themselves are relatively cool. It's the controller that gets most of the heat from running PCIE at top speed.
  - Matt3o12_ 5y ago
    The heatsink doesn't really work, though, and is marketing for the most part [1]. I have a crucial P1 NVME SSD and I can make it overheat pretty reliably. Pretty much any synthetic workload makes it overload if the SSD is empty (it reaches 70° pretty quickly and even starts throttling until it reaches 80° and the whole system starts shuttering because of extreme throttling do it doesn't damage itself. Although I have not properly tested it, it seems that not using any heatsinks from my motherboard makes the temps actually better but it still overheats. The main reason it can overheat quickly is probably because its sitting in a really bad position where it gets close to zero airflow despite being in an airflow focused case. Most motherboards place the nvme slot directly under the GPU. The main problem seems to be that the controller is overheating when it's writing at close to 2000 MB/s. It's also important to note that only the controller (an actual relatively powerful ARM processor), not the flash memory, seems to overheat. Fortunately, this is mostly not an issue because it's a QLC drive and the workload is unrealistic in the real world. When writing to an empty drive at 2000MB/s (Queue depth 4, 128k sequential writes), it takes 2 minutes until the cache is full. The way its currently used, it takes 30 secs for the cache to become full and for write speeds to drop to 150MB/s. The only way it has every overheated in the real world was during the loading screen of a gameplay when it reached 78C quickly (and I only noticed it in the hardware monitor). If the GPU hadn't heated up the nvme drive before (it was sitting at 65C mostly idle), and starved it for air, I doubt it would have hit 60C. So until motherboards start placing nvme where it can get some actual cooling, or they make actual functioning heatsinks, their power usage can make a difference. [1]: https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/2781-msi-m2-heat-shield-increases-temperatures https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/2781-msi-m2-heat-shield-i... but there are many more articles/forum posts with similar issues.
    - zamadatix 5y ago
      The Crucial P1 is a budget SSD that doesn't come with a proper heatsink, similar in quality to that god awful "heat shield" in that linked review. When I say "High performance m.2 drives come with removable finned heatsinks" I mean an actual high performance drives that come with a finned heatsinks like https://www.amazon.com/Corsair-Force-MP600-Gen4-PCIe/dp/B07SQZYW2V/ https://www.amazon.com/Corsair-Force-MP600-Gen4-PCIe/dp/B07S... not examples of budget drives paired with flat pieces of metal. Also your high performance SSD should be going in the direct-to-CPU slot to the right of the GPU, not under it.
hermitdev 5y ago
I had a 10k RPM SCSI 3.5" HDD in my desktop 20 years ago. I don't remember the power draw, but it got hot enough to the touch to burn flesh. I ended up rigging a case fan to blow directly on it to keep it reasonably cool. Neither case nor motherboard were intended for that drive (mid-tower Dell home case of the era). I even had to solder the fan directly to the missing pins on the motherboard.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

Would be cool to have a general liquid cooling solution for all components. We'd install a radiator outside our homes just like an air conditioning unit and then connect the computers to it.