Posted 18 October 2023

NVMe manufacturer heatsinks and third party enclosures

Is it worth buying a drive with a built in heatsink? Can it be removed when the need arises or are they usually affixed permanently? If can be removed, will it invalidate warranty?

Regarding NVMe enclosures to use as an external drive, I assume they normally only accept bare drives as they have their own thermal dissipation? And are the pads reusable if I use the enclosure with different drives?

Thanks
Community Updates
New Comment

9 Comments

sorted by
's avatar
  1. C0mm0d0re_K1d's avatar
    If you buy a drive with the heatsink already affixed (Sabrent/Samsung) Pulling it off can void the warranty on some drives.

    In general pulling heatsinks off things, other than a CPU or GPU (to regressed or replace it) is not a good idea. You can damage things if you don't know what your doing or your not careful.

    Some enclosures have their own cooling system or heatsink as part of the case. Some work well and some don't. Some have none and require a heatsink or pad attached to the drive before installation.

    The newest and fastest M2 drives can get very hot (both controller and flash ram) So it's a good idea to have some sort of cooling.

    Buy a decent enclosure which incorporates cooling without a heatsink. If you have to attach a cooling solution, don't pull it off.
    MeOldMucka's avatar
    Author
    Thanks.

    So if I buy an NVMe with a heatsink, I won't be able to use it as an external?

    And if I have a few NVMe drives to use as external with enclosures, I'd have to buy more than one?
  2. Somersett's avatar
    If you have very high speed flash, and intend to do a LOT of continuous writes, it is far more difficult to cool the chips than you may think.

    Reads do not generate significant heat. Good brands should safely thermally throttle. Standard provided heatsinks are usually pretty much for show only. An external enclosure is usually doing little better than SATA speeds (500MB/s), so the main issue with them is VENTING (to avoid heat death).

    There are some Youtube channels exploring the cooling of very high speed NVMe drives. But the usual tech influencer sites are a waste of space on this subject.
  3. EndlessWaves's avatar
    Heatsinks only affect how long a drive can sustain high performance for before thermally throttling but that's also affected by lots of other factors like the flash and the controller one drive with a heatsink can easily be worse than a different model without.

    So they're very much an undesirable feature that you have to decide to put up with if the model that's best for your requirements comes with one.

    Assuming we're talking M.2 SSDs here of course. If you've got a heavy drive workload and are looking at enterprise drive form factors then that's a different story.
  4. MeOldMucka's avatar
    Author
    Thanks for the replies.

    Not looking for a drive now, but just for future ref., and maybe good to hear from user experiences, are any of the following with factory heatsinks any good or just get their heatsink- less counterparts?

    SN850X
    980 Pro
    Firecuda 530
's avatar