The Angelbird Wings PX1 M.2 Adapter Review: Do M.2 SSDs Need Heatsinks?
by Billy Tallis on December 21, 2015 8:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionately more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill modern SSDs, so performance should never drop all the way down to the steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here.
For the Heavy test, we see a bit of a trend of the heatsink having a very slight negative impact on performance. The 256GB drive reverses the trend when looking at the number of outliers, and the disparity for the 512GB drive appears larger than for the previous test, but we're only looking at a difference of a few hundred operations out of an hour-long test.
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RealBeast - Monday, December 28, 2015 - link
"You know, since the LED's are white" Not really.Tell the Nobel committee about it. The 2014 prize in physics went to the blue boys -- red and green had been around for a while, and only they made white possible: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/lau...
h4rm0ny - Tuesday, December 22, 2015 - link
Whilst agreeing with your point, you want either 'irrespective' or 'regardless', not "irregardless".More on topic I agree with both of you - I both recognize that what Teizo says about the customer base is probably true, and also agree with mooninite's despair that this is so. The two posts are not incompatible.
Murloc - Tuesday, December 22, 2015 - link
-less = withoutir- = in- before an 'r', the same as English un- (in- is latin, un- is germanic), it has a negative or privative force.
pick one but not both.
That said, RGB LEDs would make it cost too much, the price is already too high for consumers.
ddriver - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
DO'H, it is not rocket science, if it overheads and throttles back as a result, then it obviously needs a heat sink.bug77 - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
I think these tests answer another important question: when does it overheat.As it is, the drives only overheat during sustained write. This is far from unexpected, but at the same time it is reassuring to know it is the only scenario where a drive would throttle (as opposed to throttling under regular desktop usage).
ddriver - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
But what about another important question, how much does it "hurt" to add a dollar worth of aluminum to improve a product worth several hundred dollars?bug77 - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
If you have ever installed an M.2 drive, then you know there's not much space left for a heatsink. And you can only install it on one side. Even so, it's so close to the motherboard (and usually between PCIe slots) that if you don't have a hell of an airflow, it won't make much difference anyway.And that's only for desktops, good luck trying to fit a M.2 drive with a heatsink attached into an ultrabook.
ddriver - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
You are very limited conceptually - it doesn't have to be a "radiator" type of heatsink, a flat piece of aluminum 2-3 mm thick would suffice. Heatsinks come in various shapes and sizes, not necessary the bulky, thick finned design.The SSD doesn't displace a lot of heat to begin with, but without a heatsink for that HEAT to SINK into the bare chip quickly runs out of thermal room.
Even if it still throttles, it will ramp the temp up slower as the heatsink will act as a buffer, and regardless of how little airflow it may have, a larger piece of aluminum will always displace much more heat than a tiny chip.
It will be slower to overheat and faster to cool, even in an ultrabook or tablet, and yes, with the kind of heatsink it merits it will have no trouble fitting into portable devices.
Judging by the performance regressions from adding a heatsink to the larger model, it would seem that engineers were well aware it throttles and have optimized the product for it, so taking care of the heat puts the device in a less than optimal standing. A firmware update should be enough to address this issue and eliminate any sort of performance regressions and actually improve it somewhat. Engineering a product which runs worse with better cooling - that's kind of an epic fail.
jjj - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
Unless it detects benchmarks and lets the controller clock higher for better scores.If VW can do it , the possibility needs to be investigated elsewhere too.nathanddrews - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
You know what this means, right? Next test: custom water blocks.