[linker3000]

This is well known in the industry. Just under 10 years ago, I was on a support team for 'Enterprise flash', which meant PCIe cards stuffed with NAND flash. The card sizes were 500MB to 2.2TB.

One of our tasks was to help qualify supported systems, which went down to approving SOME chassis IF the card was in a particular slot with a specific airflow. In some cases, it was required that internal ribbon cables were re-routed to improve airflow. The flash cards would throttle progressively at set temperatures, eventually going read-only and offline to protect the contents.

The issue of temperature and thermal throttling carried-on into the 'consumer' HDD replacement market. I can recall attending an online tech briefing on SSDs where I put a comment in the chat that one issue not being covered was device temperature. When this was put to the panel of 'experts', they were a bit bemused, commenting that SSDs don't get hot because they consume less power than HDDs. Environmental conditons were not even considered.

Truth is that, with a bit of averaging, the power consumption of a modern 2TB HDD is about the same as a 2TB SSD: around 2-5W. Both devices generate heat and both devices are often in a warm environment.

[jotm]

2.5" SSDs have the advantage of being surrounded by a heatsink (at least all SSDs I've seen had a (semi)metallic case and thermal pads), while m.2 and NVMe often do not.

So a lot of them fail from overheating - mostly cheaper models/makes. But even the cheapest Samsungs (that their own controllers) seem to fare better than cheap brands like ADATA.

Actually, this has been a problem for a lot of controllers - RAID, SATA, USB3.x, networking cards that fail due to the manufacturer using subpar cooling - usually a small heatsink that they've deemed to be good enough under "normal usage" (i.e. not heavy, sustained usage), or they rely on server cooling to do the job (which actually makes sense).