Are NVMe SSD Heatsinks Worth Using? M.2 Heatsink Comparison

how's it going everybody today i want to talk about nvme drives and whether or not they need a heat sink this video is brought to you by my personal pocketbook so if you'd like to help me out like subscribe and check out my patreon page so i can make more videos like this one so what i've got is a small collection of heatsinks that i'm going to test with a m.2 drive it's a 2280 this is a pretty typical size anything that you buy today for the most part for consumer pc is going to be 2280 that just means 22 is 22 millimeters by 80 million yeah 80 millimeters that's the size of the drive so i've got several of them here but before we actually get into that i want to talk about the anatomy of nvme m.2 drives and the controversy or arguments online about whether or not it needs to be cooled so i've removed the sticker from this drive it's a wd black sn750 and what you can see are basically those big components on there one of them is the controller one of the dram and two of those are the actual nand flash memory itself now there's no real debate about whether or not you should cool the controller it's like any processor it needs to be cooled the debate comes around the nand some people saying it should be cool just like everything else and it'll help with longevity and other people saying it shouldn't be cooled at all but what i'd like to do is point to two specific articles one of them from eeweb and it states the higher the temperature that the nand flash experiences the greater the acceleration of charge detracting mechanisms that could lead to random data bit failures nand endurance is also impacted since endurance has an inverse relationship to data retention and the rate of wear out of nand cells is affected by temperature at the time of programming and erasing nand they later conclude nand is subject to two competing factors relative to temperature at high temperature programming and erasing of nand cell is relatively less stressful to its structure but data retention of a nand cell suffers at low temperatures data retention of the nand cell is enhanced but the relative stress to the cell structure due to the programming erase operations increases and in the other article from ni.com they say much of the same things but one of their diagrams i want to point to talks about this effect this data retention effect and how it stacks by an order of magnitude depending on the temperature i think that's a really important thing to remember so keep that in mind and we'll revisit that in the conclusion of this video so the heat sinks i'm using today three of them are aftermarket that i've bought one of them came with the motherboard so the first one is ellutang just some company i got this off amazon it was 15 it came with this and it came with another one that was quite a bit bigger but this one was just 16 grams it's definitely the smallest so this brand is pallody and it's a bit bigger and this one has two sides it's going to sandwich the drive in between the two pieces the next largest one i have is just the one that came with my motherboard from gigabyte and it weighs 30 grams this is something that's very typical on motherboards especially higher end ones you'll find the heatsinks are included and the last one i have is this chonker this is from sabrent it's the rocket nvme heatsink and this one weighs 99 grams almost 100 grams and it's way more than any of the others i had some troubles actually installing this one there are four screws that are to be screwed into the side but they line up fine but the problem is it leaves too much space between the thermal tape and the drive so there was actually a gap between the thermal tape and the drive on the side that really matter which was the side that was touching the largest part of this heat sink so i actually had to use the elastic bands that came with the elutang one to keep it on there which was a bit disappointing for one this one cost by the way forty dollars compared to i think the next most expensive was fifteen and that came with two separate heat sinks a big one and a small one and i am a bit disappointed i didn't get one with a little tiny 20 millimeter fan on there had a friend message me recently you pointed out that one of them came with rgb which is a disappointment but even bigger disappointment it came with light pollution and who doesn't need more light pollution in their computer so the testing parameters i basically made my own sweet essentially it would last about an hour of different things i would do and just to get an idea of how well this would work in general day-to-day use kind of kind of anyways we'll see how it goes but anyways the first thing i did was put this thing in my computer without the sticker on it without a heatsink i loaded up windows steam discord i installed some games adobe etc i basically set it up as if i was going to use it like my my own drive from here on in so each test was the same i would turn on the computer i would leave it for 10 minutes take a temperature reading for the idle do some light work take a temperature reading play gta 5 for 20 minutes take a temperature reading wait five minutes copy a 33 gigabyte folder full of files onto the drive take a temperature reading wait another five minutes do crystal disk marks default nvme settings with the eight gigabyte test i repeat that three times with the temperature reading of course and then wait 10 minutes to take a final idle temp reading so here on the graph we have to the left is the idle temps the no heatsink at 45 the ellu tang at 42 the pilot at 39 the gigabyte at 39 and sabrint at 35. this was no surprise to me it's what i expected the heavier the drive the better heat soak and the lower the temperatures would be next was some light work this was a bit surprising to see that the temperatures didn't change at all so light work i was just checking emails i was going watching youtube videos just using my computer like i normally would but i wasn't playing games and i wasn't using any photoshop or video editing or anything like that next was playing gta 5 for 20 minutes so i basically just drove around doing regular normal gta things no missions or anything but just driving around los santos and this is where we finally see some stress onto the drive heating up so the no heatsink we got 54 max ellu tang 53 palo d49 gigabyte 51 in sabrin 46. and now i have the averages the averages were very close to the max they were all within two or three degrees but what i've found from these testings is that the temperature doesn't go too wild not until we do some actual testing with crystal disk mark but they mostly just stayed relatively close to that max they just kind of went up and just kind of wavered a little bit so i'm not too concerned about that i'm more thinking about what the maxes were and that's kind of generally was in line with their their averages anyways so the next thing i did was copy some files over didn't take too long but i definitely stressed the drive as well we have no heatsink at 57 ellutang 54 palodi 47 gigabyte 46 and cyberant 47. so this is where we're starting to see the sab rent show its weakness and that's the fact that it's a big piece of metal but it doesn't have a lot of surface area because that's the thing that's going to let the heat escape it's holding onto the heat it's not really letting go next is crystal disk marks tests now before we talk about the temperatures i want to talk about the performance of the drive depending on which heatsink i use and for every three tests for each heatsink or no heatsink there is no discernable difference between the speeds they go up and down just slightly but we're talking less than one percent nothing that you would notice in real world and even even not so it's just like it's barely a difference not even worth mentioning so well it's worth enough mentioning that i'm saying doesn't really make a difference at all so don't don't worry about performance of the drive at least in these more short bursts it's not making a difference so the temperature max the no heat sink is at 64. ellu tang at 59. palodi at 51. 51 for the gigabyte as well and the sabrin at 49. so these ones also the averages were within two or three degrees the only one that wasn't was no heat sink and that was six degrees difference its average was 58 with a max of 64. and last thing i did was wait 10 minutes and check the idle temp with the no heatsink at 45 ellutang 43 40 for palodi gigabyte and again we're seeing that sabran holding onto that heat at 40 degrees even though it's over three times bigger than the the heatsink that's on the motherboard it's it's performing just as the same basically so it seems like that's might be a good heatsink if you're really never doing anything stressful for your computer but i don't know it just it's a lot of money for in this case no real performance difference all right so looking at those results it would seem at least on the surface pretty clearly that if you wanted a cooler drive the best ones to get are going to be the ploty having a heatsink already on the motherboard or you know something like this is saturn it's expensive for forty dollars i think compared to what else you can find i think it's too expensive but that doesn't matter that's neither here nor there the motherboard heatsink or the cheaper heatsink the floaty or the elutang one the the spare one that came with that's basically the same as the pelote they seem like the winners right well here's the twist there's something missing in my results i don't know if you've noticed but it's something i noticed very quickly when i was in the middle of the result results but i wanted to finish the testing anyways and that's the fact that these temperature readings where are they coming from they're coming from the controller they're not coming from the nand and most of these that you'll buy they won't give you an and reading some of them will so i found a website i can't remember the fella's name but the website is make tech easier and they did some testing two years ago and they had a samsung nvme drive that had the controller and the nand temperature readings and his readings are very telling i come to a different conclusion than they did but i'm going to tell you why so if you look at his temperature readings for we're talking idle we're talking idle and i think idol's important because that's over the long term most of the time your drive is going to be idle the vast majority of the time your drive isn't riding it's not erasing so that idle temperature is going to be very important on the nand so let's take a look when he has no heat sink versus using the motherboard heatsink the motherboard heatsink not only heats up the controller but also heats up the nand it makes it worse and then when it's writing the nand is colder than having no heat sink so it's literally doing the opposite of what you want to happen to that nand you want it to be warm when you're riding and erasing you want to be cool when you're just idle and storing and not doing anything so their conclusion about whether or not you should get a heatsink for nvme drive was that it was a resounding yes while it is easy to install and forget about your nvme ssd these drives can and will overheat critically even during normal day-to-day use in in their case that drive it did get hot the controller did get hot but the point i need to drive home here going back to those two articles is that it's mostly the biggest deal here is especially if you're someone like like me or most most people who are just using your computer casually if you're a gamer you're not going to be doing a ton of writing to your drive right so in the in most cases i think it's best to have the nand as cool as possible so all i can conclude from this is that don't use any of these don't use any of them not not like they were intended don't use them like that what you need to do is actually cool the controller and not cool the nand so if if that means getting some of those small little heat sinks and getting some thermal tape and putting those on there or removing some of that thermal tape from here and only have the thermal tape on top of say the controller that would be better so if i had any way to measure the nand like they did over on make tech easier we would have found probably that this huge honker would have heated the nand the most out of any of them spreading that heat keeping that heat from the controller and keeping on those nand and keeping that nand warm while it's at idle that's what we don't want so what can i say i spent many many days trying to figure this stuff out learning about nand and how it worked and doing this testing took a whole day whole saturday and it's kind of it's a bummer that it was all for naught because what is it's it's this stuff technically is useful but also can be somewhat damaging to your components versus not using one at all which is very interesting so take that how you will personally i'm probably going to try to remove some of that thermal tape from the stock heatsink on my motherboard and just have it on the controller that's probably what i'm going to be doing and that's probably going to be fine for for most people's use cases even not using one it's not going to be detrimental even look at my results with no heat sink i never saw the thing go above 65 degrees couldn't even get it to go above 70. so that's the controller the the nand isn't going to be as hot as that it's it's it's not that big of a deal the biggest deal is the idle temperature that's the stuff that's going to keep your data safe the cooler it is so please let me know what you think about that let me know if you disagree or if i was wrong in anything it happens but anyways this has been tech literate my name is nick thank you for watching [Music] you

Channel: Tech Illiterate

Views: 74,377

Keywords: M.2 Heatsink Comparison, Are NVMe SSD Heatsinks Worth Using, ssd heatsink, m.2 heatsink, pc ssd, pc ssd heatsink, m.2 ssd heatsink, m.2 heat sink, nvme ssd heatsink, nvme ssd, do you need m.2 heatsink, best heatsink, pc hardware, m.2 ssd, cooling your ssd, how to cool your ssd, nvme heatsink, ssd heatsink installation, ssd heatsink necessary, ssd heatsink remove sticker, ssd heatsink m.2, ssd heatsink test, ssd heatsink worth it, ssd heatsink or not, tech illiterate

Id: GVvFoX45bOw

Length: 13min 9sec (789 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 27 2021