12-22-2015, 01:15 AM
http://anandtech.com/show/9856/angelbird...eatsinks/8
Quote:When introducing the 950 Pro, Samsung assurred us that it could manage its heat output. They were right: the 950 Pro achieves a delicate balance where it will almost never overheat from a typical consumer workload, but almost any stress test can trigger sometimes severe thermal throttling. That isn't to say that the heatsink will never help in the real world; those situations are just rare, and even with the thermal throttling it would only take a few minutes to read or write the entire drive. For example, with a heatsink the 512GB 950 Pro is capable of saving an uncompressed 4k 60Hz video stream in realtime, but it'll fill up in six minutes. Other bulk data manipulation like file system or virtual machine snapshotting could be sped up some with a heatsink (provided the task consists of more than just random reads), but in general for consumer hardware and workloads the only source or destination for data that can keep up with the 950 Pro is RAM or another SSD.
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The dramatic sustained performance improvements enabled by the Wings PX1's heatsink also highlight how modern power efficiency and thermal management design tradeoffs have caught up to the M.2 form factor. With M.2 being designed first and foremost for laptops, it's not very surprising to see that many of the same performance tradeoffs that we already see with laptop CPUs and GPUs have come into play for SSDs as well. In the mobile space we essentially take it as a given that these devices have sustained performance that's going to be lower than their peak performance, a consequence of balancing between performance needs and device size & noise. As current reasoning goes, most client workloads are very bursty and only need peak performance for a short period of time; and while we can certainly dig up counterpoints to this when it comes to CPUs and GPUs, this is admittedly harder with SSDs, especially when the time to completely fill a drive is only a couple of minutes longer than the time it takes to heat up a drive to begin with. In other words, right now PCIe SSDs are a great example of client burst workload optimization in action.
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As for the the Samsung 950 Pro, it attains great performance on client workloads, but without extra cooling its performance on the heaviest of workloads is being held back. If the 950 Pro's successor is to offer increased real-world performance, it will have to also be significantly more efficient in order to keep thermal throttling out of consumer usage scenarios. In the meantime we are probably approaching a plateau for the sustained performance that a bare M.2 drive can offer.