M.2 Drives Have An Overheating Problem

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articl...Drive-703/

We're not going to sugarcoat it - the SM951 runs really, really hot. This is not at all unique to the SM951, however. Every single M.2 drive we have tested that runs at PCI-E x4 speeds runs as hot or even hotter than this drive.



As you can see, the SM951 does run cooler than the XP941 by about 5-7 ºC, but it still reached a peak temperature of 110 ºC. This wasn't after hours of benchmarking in a closed box either. The SM951 hit 100 ºC after only about a minute and 110 ºC after only about three minutes on our open air test bench.

If you notice the slight dips in temperature that occur at about the 150, 190, and 220 second mark, each of those occurred right wen the controller hit 111 ºC for a split second. Since hitting that temperature immediately caused the temperature to drop we believe the drop in temperature to indicate when the drive automatically throttles itself to keep from overheating. Anandtech, Legit Reviews, and many other review sites have shown how quickly the SM951 throttles itself due to high temperatures.

If you prefer a video over a chart, we also recorded a video showing exactly how hot both the SM951 and XP941 run when doing a simple file copy:




The high temperature of both these drives really make us consider them to not truly be M.2 drives, but rather PCI-E drives that are missing their mounting hardware. There will be some users who will run one of these drives naked in a M.2 slot, but in our opinion the only way to use these drives is to either combine them with a PCI-E adapter that includes a heatsink (we use this adapter ourselves) or otherwise affix a heatsink to the controller chip to help dissapate the heat. Not only is 110 ºC hot enough to impact the longevity of the drive, the fact that the drive throttles around that temperature also means that you will not get anywhere near peak performance unless you add additional cooling via a heatsink.