Thinking of buying 3 x Samsung 990 PRO 4TB NVMe due to promotion. Noticed there was a heatsink version that’s significantly more expensive. Are the heatsinks worth it? I am guessing that if there are non-heatsink versions then these heatsinks are mostly cosmetic?
Thanks.
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Some kind of heat dissipation is needed for pretty much anything Gen 4 or better unless you want to experience throttling during load. That being said, it makes no sense paying premium since heatsinks are cheap to buy separately.
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PCIe 4.0 nvme drives are generally going to need a heatsink of some sort or will throttle under load. It’s going to vary individually, with a few models being less “performance oriented” being able to tolerate not having a heatsink much better. Conversely, some models will basically need one at all times doing anything than just sitting there.
PCIe 5.0 even more so, they are fairly new, but I’d hazard to say that all of them require a heatsink of some kind. The ones sold without heatsinks are assuming that you have your own or something you are putting it into that comes with one.
As far as I’m aware, PCIe 3.0 models only really needed a heatsink on the controller chip, if at all. A fun fact was putting a heatsink on the flash chips could theoretically reduce the lifetime as flash “wears” more when operating colder. That said, this hasn’t turned out to be a realistic practical concern for anything but datacenter drive design considerations. Consumer SSDs typically just die because of controller failure or solder ball corrosion, not the flash wearing out. The copper lined heatspreader sticker is there for a purpose though, as it evens out the temperatures, allowing wherever the temperature sensor is located to make a better judgement of the average of what’s going on.
TL:DR
Use a heatsink, they’re not ornamental anymore.
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This is very true.
If M.2’s are bought without a heatsink, you’ll then have the option to put on a heatsink that only covers the controller.
Here’s what a PM9A3 (a PCIe 4.0 drive) looks like with one of the little heatsinks on it:
That picture is it just idling, at ~55C. Under load it is completely unmanageable without a heatsink. The controller is what produces the majority of the heat as opposed to the NAND.
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US$55 for a heatsink is a bit obscene, IMHO.
- If you put them into PCIe 3 slots, you’ll never need a heatsink.
- If you put them into PCIe 4 slots, and only access the data in “bursts”, you won’t need a heatsink.
- If you put them into PCIe 4 slots, and frequently move massive amounts of data (more than a couple of hundred GB at a time), you will need a heatsink or you will end up thermally throttled.
You can use your motherboard’s UEFI to get PCIe 4 slots to run at PCIe 3 speeds and have the SSDs run cool that way — assuming PCIe 3 speeds (4GB/s on an x4 slot) are fast enough for your use case.
I run Samsung NVMe SSDs in PCIe 4 slots (set to run in PCIe 3 mode) on two passively-cooled systems and don’t thermally throttle. I rarely need to sling around more than a couple of hundred GB, though.
tl;dr: If you don’t need 8GB/s for extended periods of time, or 4GB/s will do (and you use the mobo’s UEFI to switch your PCIe 4 ports down to PCIe 3) — then you won’t need $55 heat sinks for your 990s.
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You can literally buy some AliExpress heatsinks for like 6-10$
Also most mobos have heatsinks built in for nvme
I’ve had good luck with the jeyi brand
https://a.aliexpress.com/_mKY8AJs
https://a.aliexpress.com/_mKLBrVu
Comes with multiple sizes of thermal pads so it’s nice to have leftovers to use for other projects
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lol — both are currently on a -96% sale! AU$0.79 a pop.
Yeah they probably set the prices differently for different regions
Aah… “Welcome Deal”. I probably haven’t been there for a long time, and they are encouraging me to make a purchase. Nice.
Presumably your motherboard has built-in heatsinks on some or all your M.2 slots. An SSD you install in one of these won’t need a separate heatsink, the one on the motherboard will more than suffice. Only spend on heatsinks for the ones that you’ll be installing in slots that don’t already have one.
You may also want to make sure your motherboard’s lanes aren’t shared between M.2 slots and PCIe slots you may be using. If a slot is bottlenecked, that drive is going to perform considerably less well than one that isn’t. Assuming you’re making some sort of drive pool out of them, it may then reduce performance from all your drives.
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The versions that don’t come with an heatsink are for situations in which there’s one provided, usually by the motherboard or it can’t be fitted like in a laptop.
From my experience it is needed if you’re running it on a motherboard with no airflow directly on top of them or, even worse, under a GPU. I managed to get my 970 Evo Plus to around 88°C during a 1TB file transfer on it and I’m not proud of that. So don’t make the same mistake I did.
You can get the cheaper ones without the heatsink and add one on later. They can be had for really cheap, more than the price difference you’re gonna spend if you get one ready out of the box from Samsung.
How can I check?
Check the detailed specfication on the manufacturer’s site, or the motherboard’s manual.
Motherboard manual, logical architecture section.
If don’t use GPU or if you have HEDT board, consider using M.2 AIC card like Hyper M.2 x16 Gen 4 Card｜Motherboards｜ASUS Global.
Its cheap, its has integrated heatsink and cooling. You just must have PCIE x16 slot with x4x4x4x4 bifurcation available, and that depends on you hardware. If you have threadripper or xeon system, then you should be able to use it without issue.
If you have consumer boards, you will have to check if your first pcie slot supports bifurcation. Quick general check here [Motherboard] Compatibility of PCIE bifurcation between Hyper M.2 series Cards and Add-On Graphic Cards | Official Support | ASUS Global.
What it looks like and some quick testing here:
I’m personally more fond of these.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005611726416.html
4 M.2 on a low profile card!
Or this, 10GbE+2x M.2. This one also doesn’t require bifurcation support.
That first one requires bifurcation, seller description is just messy.
That synology card is interesting, by using X16 (?) GEN3 PLX chip they mix 2x 4g3 + 1x4g3 channels into x8g3, which means over-subscription.
I wonder how it performs under full load both from NIC and ssds. I would also bet that PLX chip make up significant part of board BOM.
Beware of included NIC though, AQ107 is cheap but temperamental.
It’s machine-translated Chinese, the seller descriptions on aliexpress are never particularly good. You need to know what you’re buying from the pictures and title. In this case, I actually have one of these cards, and it works flawlessly. But like you say it does require bifurcation support from the motherboard.
The AQ107 has a bad reputation, but I’ve never had any problems with them. The one that has been a bit flaky for me is the AQC113.
Oh, so the sticker does serve a purpose, I removed it when putting on a headsink from the mainboard.
That’s fine, so long as there’s something else to spread the heat out, like your motherboard heatsink.
As on the drive itself, Samsung are the worst one to pick. Yes the ram cache is fast, but after it’s full, you got only a 1gbps of transfert. There’s also a good reason many cie and datacenter are ditching Samsung brand. But if your data is not important, i guess it’s ok. At the end you end up getting another one and the original deal is not costing you 2x.
As other like Adata, they have a thermal throttle that can push high speed and then reduce when no heatsink on it, running in gen4 speed. But no samsung.