We Water Cooled an SSD!!

pretty much every component of a modern system can be water-cooled these days but there's one notable exception that almost no one seems to do the SSD which raises the question why don't we water cool SSDs especially when it turns out that we actually do have the power meet the Alpha cool mcx lethal tiny water cooling block that I will be using till not only liquid cool this MP 600 SSD from Corsair but also determine whether we can get any performance benefit out of it and this video is brought to you by glass wire instantly see your past and current network activity detect malware block badly behaving apps and more on your PC and Android device use offer code linus to get 25% off glassware at the link below [Music] before we get started with any adorable water-cooling though we need to establish that our NP 600 SSD here actually has a chance of benefiting from additional cooling I mean Corsair obviously thought so they went and they put this gigantic heatsink on the thing but that doesn't mean necessarily that there's a performance benefit to it it could just be to help the thing last longer or to help it operate normally in situations where it doesn't have any airflow so in order to find out if it even suffers from thermal throttling in the first place we need one of these now this is a little bit on the overkill side we've got an epic 77 forty to sixty four quarter process there are two terabytes of RAM a GTX Titan acts all that good stuff we don't really need any of that what we need is a PCI Express Gen 4 m dot 2 slot so we're gonna be using the one down here at the bottom because this SSD is capable of blisteringly fast sequential read and write speeds but only as long as it's cooled properly let's go ahead and get that installed to figure all of that out and stress our SSD to the max without venturing beyond the realm of the real world I'm gonna be using a fun little script that Anthony from our team created called the looping file copy test so you can see I'm actually moving a test file over so this is a 10 gig Sena form 1080p video file and then I'm gonna copy these 5 items I've got 2 folders LT XML tx2 output that's a text file that tells us what exactly our copy time was and this test batch file as well as the P time application [Music] and we're done so what it's gonna do is when we run this test batch file it's gonna take everything that's in the LTX folder and copy it over to LT X - Ben is gonna take everything in LT X to copy it back to LT x 101 not expected alright as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted we've got four instances of our looping file copy test and what's gonna happen is that once we run the batch file with our ten gig file in there it is going to constantly copy the contents of LT X into LT X - and when it's done doing that it's gonna copy it back and then it's gonna copy over that copy over that and keep going ad nauseam throwing the results in output dot txt so you can see it's completing these transactions in about four and a half to five seconds right now so if we experience thermal throttling we would expect those results to start to degrade over time or bad degrade this way go up there's more worse before we do that let's start with a baseline crystal disk mark run here with the drive just in a not quite idle state cuz we just copied some files but basically dating these PCI Express Gen 4 drives are fast five gigabytes a second those are pretty great results anywhere from three to five gigabytes a second sequential reads and writes but that's without my background file copy tests running at the same time so I'm gonna launch four of those just like that also I have another fun trick I want to have a look at how hot this thing is running and I happen to have just the tool this thing is so cool I love it come on baby that's hot now that's hot now this is metal which can have emissivity issues but it's black and it's matte so I'm hoping that it's not gonna be too bad it looks like we are anywhere in the neighborhood of around 50 to 52 degrees on our heat sink here but this test is just getting started right now curiously we were well over 50 degrees and now we're just over 40 but my test didn't finish not only that but it's got the option to run it again I think this just completely errored out so I don't think I'm gonna have the option of running crystal this mark while my batch files are running in the background which means I'm gonna have to rely on those text output files now our SSD is plugged into a Zenith 2 thread Ripper board and it's right here in between the PCI Express slots I installed and I didn't really install it I just kind of chucked it on there a PCI Express card to simulate what it's like for it to not have any direct airflow and we have the stress test running so you can see we are axe we've got almost 5 gigabytes a second of disk activity happening here at a cue depth of about 5 and our Drive is reporting in Hardware info about 68 degrees but I don't think that's right cuz check this out ladies and gentlemen 75 degrees max here running this test it's awful the travesty one small fly in my aunt 'men is that even after all of this time it's been running for about 40 minutes now I haven't noticed any difference in the execution time of this file copy so it doesn't seem to be throttling yep they'll consistent all of them are consistent so you might be thinking to yourself gee Linus Corsair made up pretty well designed cooler for their SSD I guess that screws over your whole video concept doesn't it to which I would reply no in fact it doesn't because there are more reasons to water cool than just preventing your stuff from thermal throttling maybe you just want it to last long everyone knows that integrated circuits will last for a longer period of time the cooler that you can keep them operating during their lifetime so we're gonna proceed with our little Frankenstein cooling experiment anyway starting by removing the existing heatsink and backplate keen-eyed among you might have noticed that lack of thermal interface material between the backplate and these NAND flash chips the reason for that is that not every component of an SSD needs to be cooled equally so the controller right here that follows the normal laws of cooler temperatures being basically better at least till you get to like deep in the sub zero's NAND flash on the other hand is actually rated by J deck at 40 degrees centigrade and apparently if it goes down to about room temperature about 25 degrees and you write to it it's right endurance can be as little as half of what it is at it's rated 40 degree temperatures so they are supposed to run a little bit warm so if I were to just take a water cooler and slap it on this thing I could actually cool certain components of it too much so we're gonna start by just putting a water block on to the controller Wow am I good or what freaking nailed it a little wipe down with alcohol ensures that our thermal adhesive will stick better that's really important because once we've got tubes hanging off this thing and all that's holding it on is some double-sided thermal tape we want it to stick as well as it possibly can oh wow that didn't stick at all oh well that's actually on there pretty good but just for safety I'm gonna throw a zip tie on here you know you like it come on I've seen worse mounting mechanisms but just because we can't water cool the flash chips doesn't mean they shouldn't have any cooling whatsoever so we're gonna go ahead and put on something kind of you know similar to what Corsair had before we're gonna put some heat sinks on them on the one side so hopefully they should soak up some of the heat not just from the chip on this side but also the one on the other I still remember making these little heat sinks back when I was a young enthusiast in Aliexpress with something like this for three bucks didn't exist I just I I cut up some chips at heatsinks off of a dead board or something like that and then sand it down the bottoms of them so they were nice and smooth that is our custom water-cooled SST let's get this thing installed before I can actually test the drive though I need to solve a small problem we're using this I think this is like 1/16 inch tubing to render this teeny tiny water block problem is all the standard G 1/4 fittings we have lying around in the PC workshop here are like quarter inch or 3/8 at the smallest so clearly that's not gonna work fortunately we have many different tubing's a handful of adapters adapter takes us from 3/8 inch on our normal water cooling equipment down to quarter inch adapter number two takes us from quarter inch down to tiny I think this is one eighth inch it might be even smaller there we go not bad right not bad at all so all that's left now is to find out if it works we're just gonna fill up our water cooling loop LTT store comm and fire this bad boy up hey there it is all right create a copy here make sure it's it yep got a couple of gigabytes a second of file copy transferred nonsense let's fire up hardware info and see what our temps are like oh dang we down at 29 degrees now boys and girls now our thermal camera results are not going to be comparable to what we had before because the block in particular is quite shiny it's quite reflective so we can't trust the readings off of it but we at least know that our PCB is running at a chilly 26 and 26 high 27 low degrees that's pretty darn good now let's hit it with a stressed shall we up everything's working as expected with our four tests running we're in the neighborhood of four gigabytes four plus gigabytes per second now let's fire up hardware info where we're sitting at a chilly 40 degrees on wherever the heck that sensor is starting to see a few hot spots so we can see our NAND flash is heating up that's right about where we want it though right in that 40 degree sort of range so it's been running for an hour there's a bit of an anomaly in the data right here where it took a hundred seconds to copy one way and then the other I think that's when the computer went to sleep because apparently I forgot to disable that but other than that we've got some pretty good-looking results we're know our drive does not in fact throttle and it's running at full speed even now after an hour operation and perhaps more importantly check this out we're getting like five gigabytes a second of disk i/o there is 5.8 whoo it's crazy perhaps more importantly though it is running at a mere 50 degrees according to hardware info and when we whip out our thermal camera pretty much everything about this is optimal so we can check that PCB temperature right between our NAND flash that's around 50 degrees perfect so we're not over cooling the flash chips then we get right in here kind of around the around the SOC you know what in the 40s something along those lines that's looking pretty chill and actually it turns out our DRAM doesn't heat up very much at all in this kind of a use case where we're just sequentially copying to and from the drive I mean can we declare victory at this point ready yeah I mean you can't install anything in the slot next to it unless you couldn't be able to install anything there it's kind of jank these might fall off if you actually are okay it has issues but it runs cooler it runs fast and we did the whole thing for just a few bucks that little little tiny water look it's like $7 how can you go wrong just like you can't go wrong with our sponsor for today's video Squarespace Squarespace is the all-in-one website building platform that makes it easy to build an online presence all you got to do is pick one of their award-winning templates and bring your website to life and stand out I mean you don't want your site to look like it's from the 1990s no matter how trivial the thing you're doing feels you never know what's gonna take off Squarespace has tons of different 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Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 2,101,679

Rating: 4.8972263 out of 5

Keywords: water, cool, cooled, ssd, drive, computer, pc, gaming, liquid, thermal, throttling, throttle

Id: lQmI5A27Iv8

Length: 14min 43sec (883 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 20 2020