6 ms·
Since when did SSDs need water cooling?
- formerly_proven 3y agoOne of the issues with M.2 in desktop PCs is how buried from the airflow they are, and often they're literally on the exhaust side of the GPU (many GPUs exhaust on both long edges, and many motherboards just so happen to have an M.2 slot under the PEG) or in the air-flow dead-zone between PEG and CPU cooler. Overall the AT(X) form factor, with extension cards slotting in at a 90° angle, just doesn't work all that well for efficient heat removal. DHE takes away I/O slot space and requires high static pressures (so high fan RPMs), it works for headless servers, but that's about it. The old-fashioned way of a backplane and orthogonal airflow does work much better for stuff like this; but it also requires a card cage and is not very flexible in terms of card dimensions. The one saving grace of ATX is that cards and their cooling solutions can grow in length and height, GPUs are much taller than a normal full-height card, and many are much longer than a full-length card is supposed to be as well.
- jackmott42 3y agoThis isn't really an issue because everyone's M.2 is working fine. You have to construct absurd scenarios to cause problems. Use a case with bad airflow, a hot GPU, and a workload that is pushing the gpu and m.2 and cpu to their limits indefinitely, which isn't a real life thing. and if it IS a real life thing because you have some special use case, you use a case with good airflow.
- zamadatix 3y agoI think this depends on what the definition of fine and problems is. IMO most don't even notice when their drive throttles due to thermals so it's probably fine that the drives get hot. At the same time, as newer drives keep drawing more and more power, this is going to start to push the limits of "well why did I buy the fast drive in the first place" if they didn't come with these ever increasing cooling solutions as well.
- alberth 3y ago> ”Overall the AT(X) form factor, with extension cards slotting in at a 90° angle, just doesn't work all that well for efficient heat removal.” To give an example of this, here’s a server from a huge cloud provider for a brand new AMD 7700 on an ATX board. Those 90° angles make for horrible airflow. https://twitter.com/PetrCZE01/status/1637122488025923585 https://twitter.com/PetrCZE01/status/1637122488025923585
- mordae 3y agoYeah, but X470D4U and similar boards are so overpriced one can somewhat relate to people using gaming boards for servers. Especially since a lot of them route ECC pins nowadays. I sure wasn't happy paying extra just to have a different board layout with mostly the same components. Well, there's IPMI at least. Still not worth the price tag.
- dx034 3y agoIt should be clear that this was only shot for marketing purposes. I don't think they actually run cables like that, but it probably looked better to have cables visible in the picture.
- alberth 3y agoDo you know this for a fact? Or are you speculating.
- ilyt 3y agoThat look more like "you put powersupply on wrong side". But yeah, most servers have risers that flip the cards to be parallel to the board.
- hgsgm 3y agoThat looks like a ribbon cable blocking the fan?
- CrimsonRain 3y agoAll of it doesn't matter because SSDs like being hot.
- Asooka 3y agoI'm water cooling both the CPU and GPU in my PC and have found out that leads to virtually no airflow over the m.2 slot. For now I've simply placed a fan aimed directly at the slot on top of the GPU and that keeps the SSD at a 50 to 60C. I am considering installing a water block on the SSD when I do maintenance next.
- numpad0 3y agoPeople are buying gaming branded PEG propping sticks and sustainer wires because high end PEGs are sagging, and neither the case nor the card support that front slot for full length cards. It’s well past the time for a card cage spec as far as I can see from the user perspective.
- jmclnx 3y ago>While NAND flash tends to prefer higher temperatures there is nothing wrong with running it closer to ambient temperatures New one on me :) I did not know NAND liked to be hot, if true does not bode well for laptops for over-clockers. To me, the end result seems to be, yes and no, up to you. But I still prefer HDD anyway, I am very old school.
- formerly_proven 3y agoNAND is bad for cold storage, because writes cause more wear when it's not warm. Meanwhile data retention benefits from lower temperatures.
- adgjlsfhk1 3y agocold storage by it's nature doesn't have a lot of writes...
- flaminHotSpeedo 3y agoAnd if there was a hot (as in frequently used) drive it would still heat up (as in temperature). But I guess the other commenters point might be valid if you run a datacenter in a blast chiller
- jackmott42 3y agoYou do not actually prefer HDD, and nothing bodes badly for overclockers or laptops. You are just looking for ways to be contrarian.
- EscapeFromNY 3y agoWhat's wrong with HDD? It's actually quite convenient having time for your morning jog and a shower while you wait for your computer to boot up.
- pixl97 3y ago
- ksec 3y agoThere were early PCI-E 5.0 SSD samples pushing closer to theoretical max of 16GB/s but were consuming up to 25W. The current PCI-E 5.0 are only about ~11GB/s. But stays within a 12W power envelop. I do wonder if we have hit law of diminishing return. With Games optimised for System on PS5 and Xbox's DirectStorage, developer are already showing 80-95% of load time are spent on CPU already.
- swarnie 3y agoWhat's the issue with a jump from 12w to 25w?
- wtallis 3y agoWe're talking about an SSD form factor that's 22x80mm and is fed by a couple of card edge pins carrying 3.3V. 12W was already pushing it.
- formerly_proven 3y agoAccording to the one-page datasheet of a Foxconn M.2 M-key socket, maximum current per pin is 0.5 A (they're tiny, after all). Since M.2 M-key has a total of nine pins carrying 3.3 V this would limit power to 15 W before any heat dissipation considerations plus connector derating because the toasty SSD is heating the connector up.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- KennyBlanken 3y ago...on a device that weighs about 10 grams with a heat capacity likely around 0.4J/gram-degrees-C. 10Ws for such a device if I did the math right is around a 2.5C/sec rise in device temperature.
- ilyt 3y agoThe M.2 sockets on motherboards don't exactly have great cooling, and SSDs don't usually even come with radiator. The positioning can also be pretty iffy, mine have one next to CPU, another just under GPU (no chance getting fan there) and those are the "fast" (directly connected to CPU) ones! The another 2 slots are again under GPU (one filled with wifi/bt card), and only last 2 are far away from other hot components and get its own heatsink. but those are not directly connected to CPU
- jeffbee 3y agoThis author is confused, or the article is just badly written. The thing that draws all the power in these newer SSDs is the controller, not the memory. Shoveling 2 million IOPS to the host CPU is a difficult task … your high-power host CPU can barely keep up. But the article goes on and on about the flash and hardly mentions the controller.
- justin66 3y ago> This author is confused, or the article is just badly written. I see you have discovered The Register. Welcome!
- zokier 3y agoI'd question could we not use more the powerful, well-cooled, cpu that we already have in our computers instead of pushing the ssd controller complexity and power ever further. What if we used something like UBIFS or F2FS and removed/simplified FTL?
- Sakos 3y agoSSD controllers are just ASICs. I'm not sure why you want to go from a chip tailored for a specific task to a general purpose one that already has way too much on its plate. Then there's things like latency and how the controller abstracts away the details of how an SSD works internally. All that complexity doesn't go away by putting it on your CPU. You're just moving it from one place to another for no benefit, and adding other complexities. Could ask the same thing about all the extra silicon in GPUs that adds hardware acceleration for video encoding/decoding.
- frou_dh 3y agoDesign priorities probably get warped by doing well at artificial benchmarks/torture-tests in reviews coming to the fore.
- wtallis 3y agoAbsolutely. CrystalDiskMark is bad for the consumer SSD market.
- tinus_hn 3y agoUnfortunately the alternative is trusting the manufacturers data which leads to cheating.
- wtallis 3y agoThe choices aren't exactly between a bad benchmark and no benchmark at all. And the widespread use of CrystalDiskMark as a de facto standard by both independent testers and drive vendors has done nothing to slow the rise of behavior that an informed consumer would consider to be cheating.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- theknocker 3y ago[dead]
- j16sdiz 3y agoFor those don't read the article: > "NAND flash actually likes to be 'hot' in that 60° to 70° [celcius] range in order to program a cell because when it's that hot, those electrons can move a little bit easier," he explained. ... Go a little too hot — say 80°C — and things become problematic
- londons_explore 3y agoSure... erasure energy is lower when it's hot... But there are lots of other downsides, like a much reduced endurance, and more noise in sense amplifiers meaning there is a higher chance of needing to repeat read operations.
- valine 3y agoDoes anyone know of a PCIE 5 SSD designed for sustained read/write? Most of these new drives are meant for short bursts of data transfer, I can’t imagine water cooling would be necessary for most drives.
- matja 3y agoKioxia CD8 : https://www.storagereview.com/news/kioxia-cd8-series-pcie-5-0-ssd-announced https://www.storagereview.com/news/kioxia-cd8-series-pcie-5-...
- rowanG077 3y agoI don't understand why pushing 16gb/s requires so much power. A fully custom ic where the data path is in silicon should be able to handle that speed no sweat.
- wtallis 3y agoSSD controllers aren't just moving a lot of data. Between the PCIe PHY and the ONFI PHY there's a lot of other functionality. In particular, doing LDPC decoding at 16GB/s (128Gb/s) is not trivial.
- andromeduck 3y agoECC/Crypto is pretty energy intensive - other bookkeeping like wear leveling and r/w disturb is also quite complicated.
- imtringued 3y ago16GB/s over a serial interface with 4 lanes is 32Ghz per lane.