Hello everyone and welcome to ZD Tech, ZDNet’s daily editorial podcast. My name is Guillaume Serries and today I explain to you why SSD memories heat up more and more and why they will have to be cooled. Stop putting fans in it..
When SSDs began to replace mechanical hard drives in the early 2000s, one of the benefits was that SSDs used less power and therefore generated much less heat in machines.
But now, SSD performance has gone from transfer rates of a few MB/s to 5 GB/s, or even more. Especially since the first results of the SSDs of 5and generation should allow transfer rates of 10 to 12 Gb/s.
But then, why do SSDs start to heat up all of a sudden?
Sébastien Jean, the technical director of Phison, a Taiwanese company that manufactures and sells controllers for SSD memories, assures that each additional GB/s of transfer speed requires the consumption of approximately one watt of additional power.
Enough to explode the temperature of SSD memories in operation. And affect their performance.
But then, why do SSDs start to heat up all of a sudden? Well, because of their controllers. So the controllers, quesaco ?
When the SSD goes into thermal throttling mode
Well, the controller is a part placed inside the SSD. Its goal ? Managing everything that comes in and out of the SSD, i.e. managing the flow of data exchanged by the flash storage chips and the rest of the PC.
And it turns out that these controllers are getting ever more complex to handle increasing NAND cell density.
Basically, the denser the cells, the larger the storage volumes, the harder the controller works.
Problem, an SSD memory works optimally between 25 and 50°C. And the NAND cells embedded in SSD memories radically lose performance beyond 70 degrees.
“You know you need better cooling when performance starts at 7 GB/s and suddenly drops to 500 MB/s,” explains Sébastien Jean. “When you see this rapid drop, it is very likely that the SSD has gone into thermal throttling mode. »
Switch to active cooling
Of course, one of the industry’s strategies remains to increasingly miniaturize the elements of SSD memories to use lower electrical voltages while moving as much, if not more, data. The idea is to go from an engraving fineness of 16 to 7 nanometers.
But this may not be enough to make future generations of SSD memories work properly.
And so, to continue to operate SSD memories correctly, they will have to be cooled. Some PCIe 5.0 SSDs may require active cooling modules to operate.
It will therefore be necessary to put small metal heat sinks around the SSD memories, or even fans soon.