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by madaxe_again
1492 days ago
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It had never even occurred to me that my storage would want cooling, until I swapped in a new motherboard, moving from atx to mini-itx, and I noticed that the nvme.2 socket was covered by a heat sink. Performance is literally 50% better - and it still gets toasty. |
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Technically, the storage medium itself doesn't require cooling (the NAND flash chips). The issue is NAND does not exist in a vacuum on its own, as far as computer storage goes, but the SSD needs a controller to manage the data I/O from the PCI-Express bus across all the NAND chips and also caching to DRAM/SLC in between while doing various integrity, error checks and trimming in the background, so those controllers need to be very powerful for the insane speeds the PCI-E bus is capable of, being usually multi core ARM chips running a real-time OS with complex algorithms, so of course they run hot when you push them hard.
Hard disks also had controllers to manage the transfer of data between IDE/SATA to the DRAM cache and then finally the spinning rust, but since the speeds were s much slower, those controllers didn't run as hot. However, some HDDs still benefited from cooling as they had a powerful motor spinning at over 10K RPM which made the drives hot.
In either case, there's no free lunch, when you push lots of current through electronics chasing extreme performance, you get lots of heat that needs to get dissipated somehow, simple as that.