M.2 Drives Have An Overheating Problem

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articl...tling-868/

Overall, the Samsung 960 Pro is an excellent improvement over the 950 Pro. Not only is the raw performance of the drive better, but Samsung has greatly improved how long the drive can handle heavy loads before throttling. It is still certainly possible to cause the drive to throttle eventually, but it takes long enough to do so that the vast majority of users would never encounter it.

We already listed the advertised performance of both the 960 and 950 Pro earlier in this article (and there was nothing in our testing to indicate they are incorrect), but we did want to give a summary chart for how quickly these drive will throttle:

While the fact that the 960 Pro takes much longer to throttle (2-4 times longer in fact) is terrific, what is really impressive is how much more data you can actually read or write before the throttling occurs. Since the 960 Pro is a faster overall drive, you can actually read or write between three and six times more data before the throttling kicks in. While that is great in and of itself, it also means that throttling in general is much less likely to happen. Sequentially writing 72 GB of data is hard enough to do at the 1.5 GB/s speed of the Samsung 950 Pro, and doing so for 336 GB of data at over 2 GB/s is going to be even more rare.

We don't quite want to say that thermal throttling is something you never need to worry about with the 960 Pro, but what we are willing to say is that unless you have a piece of software that is capable of reading or writing hundreds of GB of data at 2-3.5 GB/s, you are very unlikely to ever encounter throttling. And even if you do, when the 960 Pro throttles it tends to still be faster than the 950 Pro at it's best, so you probably would not notice the drop in performance.

Keep in mind that the throttling we saw was largely due to the controller on the M.2 drive overheating. Our testing was done with the system at idle, so if your system has a number of hot components and poor ventilation around the M.2 drive, a 960 Pro (or any M.2 NVMe drive for that matter) will likely throttle faster than what we recorded. If you are concerned about this and want to ensure your drive will never throttle, we recommend using a PCI-E adapter card with a built-in heatsink (we use the Bplus M2P4A here at Puget Systems) to help improve the cooling.