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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edzieba - Tuesday, December 22, 2015 - link
With most Skylake ITX boards having the m.2 slot on the back, it would be interesting to see how well a simple coupling of the drive to the motherboard backplate with an adhesive thermal pad compares to the bare drive (and/or to a dedicated PCIe slot heatsink like this). I suspect the relatively tiny power levels involved (barely over 5W at most) would mean a nice sheet of aluminium or steel would be more than enough heatsinking for even sustained heavy loads.zodiacfml - Tuesday, December 22, 2015 - link
Performance of these drives are awesome that I would never be able to throttle them even if I try. Regarding the form factor, I believe they have designed it really well. It might be too big in 5 to years from now.fvbounty - Tuesday, December 22, 2015 - link
Can you post some temps, I'm surprised you didn't have them in the review?kilgor270 - Friday, January 1, 2016 - link
Just installed my PX1 with a Samsung SM951 as my boot drive. The PX1 seems to be very well constructed in my opinion. Easy to put the SM951 chip in and then install into computer.The white LED's were a surprise. Since I'm not a gamer, to me the leds are just an indication that power is going to the board. I monitored the heat using a couple software apps and at first glance without stressing it, it is hovering around 90 degrees F. Performance r/w is right around 1450 MBs +/-Overall for a couple days testing, I am very very happy with this combination as a boot drive. Totally changed my overall system profile in a very positive way.
orencom - Thursday, January 7, 2016 - link
the real question is weather there are real use cases which utilize PCIe SSD bandwidth capabilities...Machou360 - Sunday, January 10, 2016 - link
Just bought two of these and in RAID0, they are a beast ! Made the same bentches and putting a raspberry heatsink on each of the M2 controller simply avoids any heat issue (had to remote part of the sticker for that, which was very easy) I would recommend these drives anytime, performance is superb!XmppTextingBloodsport - Saturday, March 19, 2016 - link
"Will thrashing air about be efficacious?""Should we really rely upon [haphazard] fans for cooling?"
jefflynn333 - Sunday, September 4, 2016 - link
I would like to see the Angelbird tested against just using small heat sinks attached to the 950. That seems like a logical alternative.