m.2 questions... lots of questions.

[batboy]

While we wait for Neb to answer... my PCH temp seems to climb to 42 and then stay there. I have pretty good case flow.

 

[Nebulous]

I don't wanna hijack bat'z thread, so I posted my answer in my own thread

 

[TimoneX]

How do you read the temps of the SSD? I have a fan controller with thermistors. I put one under the drive in about the middle. I have a large sink on the m.2 that seems to be working well. The highest I've seen is 34 C (I know that's not the controller temp). I do have a temp on the motherboard called PCH that I'm not sure what it's for.

I ran Crystaldiskmark, I have no idea if it's good or bad.

View attachment 192907

Those numbers are sick. The 960 Pro is definitely a nice drive. Some of the benchmarking performance is the result of trickery(for lack of a better term), but it's probably the best performing m.2 drive out there overall. Just wish they were cheaper. At right around $.59/GB they're definitely priced at a premium.

Turns out my drive...the MyDigitalSSD BPX is incompatible with my new MSI x399/TR 1950x rig...so it'll be relegated to my Z270 rig and it's back to the drawing board for selecting an m.2 drive for the new build. I think it's down to the 960 Pro(1TB)($579) or the Plextor M8peG(1TB)($436). The Sammy is definitely faster overall, but with a shorter endurance and a 33% price premium I'm leaning toward the MLC based Plextor at this point. Both are on MSI's QVL...so should both work with the MSI x399 motherboard.

 

[Sentential]

Those numbers are sick. The 960 Pro is definitely a nice drive. Some of the benchmarking performance is the result of trickery(for lack of a better term), but it's probably the best performing m.2 drive out there overall. Just wish they were cheaper. At right around $.59/GB they're definitely priced at a premium.

Turns out my drive...the MyDigitalSSD BPX is incompatible with my new MSI x399/TR 1950x rig...so it'll be relegated to my Z270 rig and it's back to the drawing board for selecting an m.2 drive for the new build. I think it's down to the 960 Pro(1TB)($579) or the Plextor M8peG(1TB)($436). The Sammy is definitely faster overall, but with a shorter endurance and a 33% price premium I'm leaning toward the MLC based Plextor at this point. Both are on MSI's QVL...so should both work with the MSI x399 motherboard.

Since you’ve got the space consider some cheapo XG3s on eBay. They’re hot as a mug sure but that can be controlled and everyone is unloading them because they’re overheating in laptops for NOTHING!

Saw one 512gb with multiple available for $155 which is absurdly cheap for a good MLC nvme drive

$299 for a 1tb drive!

http://m.ebay.com/itm/Dell-Toshiba-1024GB-PCIe-Gen-3-NVMe-THNSN51T02DU7-Solid-State-Drive-RDHKG-/112509599115?hash=item1a32183d8b%3Ag%3AapMAAOSwlFJZhGyY&_trkparms=pageci%253Aa17cecb9-8625-11e7-b650-74dbd1803270%257Cparentrq%253A02f54c5f15e0a9cb9feee6b3fffa541e%257Ciid%253A1

 

[Max0r]

I got my Evo up to 53C after a couple minutes of non-stop sequential reads. How does that sound temp-wise?

The pic is toward the end of 1 battery of tests. It seems high speed sequentials heat it up the most.



I notice in Windows 10 there's always something writing at least 30 KB/s to the damn thing. Sometimes it's as much as 70 KB/s and in many cases it's unidentifiable system stuff being written to the NTFS Volume Log or some such thing. But I also noticed the M$ Edge browser loves to also constantly stream write while idle, in perpetuity. I've also noticed Cortana doing the same thing. I elected nay for many Cortana things but did not yet hunt it down and destroy it. Either way if I leave the system on 24/7 I can expect 1TB - 4 TB writes per year. Not good for an Evo

Eventually I plan to hunt down and destroy every last trace of needless writes. I'm sure it will be very educational, even if much of it amounts to nothing.

 

[EarthDog]

Not sure.. i ditch edge and shut cortana off.

 

[TimoneX]

Since you’ve got the space consider some cheapo XG3s on eBay. They’re hot as a mug sure but that can be controlled and everyone is unloading them because they’re overheating in laptops for NOTHING!

Saw one 512gb with multiple available for $155 which is absurdly cheap for a good MLC nvme drive

$299 for a 1tb drive!
http://m.ebay.com/itm/Dell-Toshiba-...%3A02f54c5f15e0a9cb9feee6b3fffa541e%7Ciid%3A1

Thanks, I haven't done business with fleabay since their paypal scams really got rolling. There are some on Toshiba XG3 based OEM drives on amazon, but the performance isn't really anything to write home about...they are cheap though so I haven't ruled them out.

I got my Evo up to 53C after a couple minutes of non-stop sequential reads. How does that sound temp-wise?

The pic is toward the end of 1 battery of tests. It seems high speed sequentials heat it up the most.

View attachment 192925

I notice in Windows 10 there's always something writing at least 30 KB/s to the damn thing. Sometimes it's as much as 70 KB/s and in many cases it's unidentifiable system stuff being written to the NTFS Volume Log or some such thing. But I also noticed the M$ Edge browser loves to also constantly stream write while idle, in perpetuity. I've also noticed Cortana doing the same thing. I elected nay for many Cortana things but did not yet hunt it down and destroy it. Either way if I leave the system on 24/7 I can expect 1TB - 4 TB writes per year. Not good for an Evo

Eventually I plan to hunt down and destroy every last trace of needless writes. I'm sure it will be very educational, even if much of it amounts to nothing.

I noticed that too and they persist even when you turn off every spyware option M$ crammed into 10. There's a host file template floating around the interbubez for easy blocking of the addys used to phone home. The easiest way I've found to stop browsers from going nuts with incessant writes all over the system drive is to simply move their cache to a ram drive. It's all crap I don't want stored in a zero power state anyway, so it works out well.

 

[Sentential]

eBay is an awesome place to pick up nvme drives as people like me are the ones dumping them there. I honestly cannot think of a single drive that doesn’t throttle to one degree or another on a laptop. The only ones I haven’t seen do this are Macs that integrate the heat sink into the controller plus they use a low power custom SOC to boot.

The only downside is do not buy anything using smart post or ups post. They take forever and while I am happy I found a 5400s to raid with it has taken 12 days so far to arrive and it still isn’t here.

If I had a desktop I would totally buy an OEM drive that was rejected because it overheats

The advantage is while the drive by itself isn’t great if you can get a 512gb drive for $150 and you’ve got a board with 3 slots for $450 a well cooled xg3 in raid0 x3 (1.5tb) will smoke anything out there and will be cheaper than a single 960pro 1tb

The trick is keeping them below 50C* before stage 1 throttling normally starts which should be no problem.

 

[TimoneX]

eBay is an awesome place to pick up nvme drives as people like me are the ones dumping them there. I honestly cannot think of a single drive that doesn’t throttle to one degree or another on a laptop. The only ones I haven’t seen do this are Macs that integrate the heat sink into the controller plus they use a low power custom SOC to boot.

The only downside is do not buy anything using smart post or ups post. They take forever and while I am happy I found a 5400s to raid with it has taken 12 days so far to arrive and it still isn’t here.

If I had a desktop I would totally buy an OEM drive that was rejected because it overheats

The advantage is while the drive by itself isn’t great if you can get a 512gb drive for $150 and you’ve got a board with 3 slots for $450 a well cooled xg3 in raid0 x3 (1.5tb) will smoke anything out there and will be cheaper than a single 960pro 1tb

The trick is keeping them below 50C* before stage 1 throttling normally starts which should be no problem.

I despise paypal. I won't go near fleabay.

I have thought about striping a couple. The x399 platform is particularly well suited as it has 60PCIe lanes and on the MSI board I'm on there are zero dark ports across the entire board. My only hesitation is that I'm sure I will end up with multiple m.2 drives on here anyway and filling up the onboard slots with low capacity drives isn't all that appealing. I tend to use them as scratch discs for video editing so two of them is ideal. There is that super kewl 4xm.2 RAID add on card you linked to. That + 4 of the 512GB XG3 drives is still cheaper than a single 2TB Sammy 960 Pro while likely close to double the throughput. I dunno, still putting this rig together so I've had bigger fish to fry, but I'll have to make a decision soon as it seems like all the MLC options are disappearing.

 

[batboy]

Just wanted to report back after using the Samsung 960 Pro as the boot drive for a few days. It's working great, I love 15 second boots into Windows. Good air flow and a sink are critical to the longevity of this drive. I'll repost the photo of the heatsink I installed onto my m.2 drive (lower left corner of the photo).

I ran CrystaDisklMark again using HWinfo to monitor temps and max controller temp was 66 C (that was only a spike at the very end of the bench). Most of the time temps stayed in the low to mid 50s. I did see low 60s on the very last bench. After hearing of that some folks were seeing 90+, I feel like my heatsink was working quite well. It's a Thermaltake RAM sink that is held on with thermal tape and zip ties (ala the Nebulous method).

 

[TimoneX]

Well done, but I also suggest you go ahead and sink that nekkid 7740x.

I see what you mean re: the 2nd m.2 on that board. Would've been nice if Asus engineers could've squeezed that in above the 2nd x16 slot instead.

lol Samsung offers financing on their drives:

http://www.samsung.com/us/computing...state-drives/ssd-960-pro-m-2-1tb-mz-v6p1t0bw/

That's ridiculous...if you have to finance an SSD...you can't afford it. I may end up with a couple 1TB Pros. They have 2x the endurance rating of the EVO and a 5yr warranty still. The performance is definitely there. I noticed prices on the 960 EVO have begun to fall...looks like $419 on newegg for the 1TB EVO, which makes it slightly cheaper than the superior Plextor MLC based drives @ $436. Perhaps there'll be a sale on the big dog 960 Pro TB models soon.

 

[Sentential]

Just wanted to report back after using the Samsung 960 Pro as the boot drive for a few days. It's working great, I love 15 second boots into Windows. Good air flow and a sink are critical to the longevity of this drive. I'll repost the photo of the heatsink I installed onto my m.2 drive (lower left corner of the photo).

I ran CrystaDisklMark again using HWinfo to monitor temps and max controller temp was 66 C (that was only a spike at the very end of the bench). Most of the time temps stayed in the low to mid 50s. I did see low 60s on the very last bench. After hearing of that some folks were seeing 90+, I feel like my heatsink was working quite well. It's a Thermaltake RAM sink that is held on with thermal tape and zip ties (ala the Nebulous method).

66c* is getting up there, might want to consider a larger heatsink. I personally would wnat to keep the drive below 50C* at all cost.

 

[batboy]

Regarding the heat sink(s) on the m.2 drive, there is circuitry on these drives, so be careful when you mount your sink. Back when I was sticking sinks onto clock generator chips, and on mosfets, and vid card memory chips, etc. I used Arctic Silver epoxy. But that is conductive and might cause problems if some excess squeezes out when you put the sink into place. That's why for my m.2 drive I used a thermal pad (sticky on two sides). With the high heat the thermal pad and/or the label on the drive might get gooey causing the sink to slip. I copied Nebulous and used a couple small black zip ties to secure the heat sink.

It's really time for us "enthusiasts" to move toward Extended-ATX cases and form factor motherboards. There needs to be more room for our goodies, like another SATA controller (I have 6 SATA connections, I'd rather have 8), and more m.2 sockets, more USB headers, more room to spread out the hot power circuitry, more everything. I could use an adapter card in the lowest PCI-e slot. It's "only" 8X, but since these NVME drives only use 4 lanes, then no problem.

Sent, see how my drive sits? One end is almost between the slots. There's a motherboard heatsink in the way on one side. I don't think I can get a bigger sink in there. The front case fan blows right towards the m.2 sink, so I thought that would be enough. I could try a small fan mounted onto the sink for active cooling.

 

[batboy]

Here, this pic will give you a better idea of how it looks with other stuff in the case. The heatsink is 20mm wide and the smallest fan I have is 40mm.

 

[Nebulous]

The 40mm will do Batz. Mount it so there's airflow over the drive's sink. You know the drill. I added an old AMD 60mm fan and it's blowing downward and across the sink on my drive. My drive's temp sits @ 30-32c

 

[batboy]

Ok, I moved some cables around and zip tied them out of the way for better flow from the front fan to the m.2 sink. I also set the lower side panel fan speed from medium to high. I ran the bench again and this time I had a max temp of 64 C, again only towards the end of the benchmarks. Most of the time it was high 40s to mid 50s. From what I've been seeing on the boards, an occasional spike into the mid 60s is pretty good compared to what others are getting with this Samsung drive. I'm seeing lots of people complaining of hitting 90 C. I think it starts thermal throttling at 90, right?

 

[Nebulous]

Me thinks they start to throttle from 82c on up. If you can keep the temps behind the 60c marker, you'll be good. Of course cooler is always better.

 

[TimoneX]

Ok, I moved some cables around and zip tied them out of the way for better flow from the front fan to the m.2 sink. I also set the lower side panel fan speed from medium to high. I ran the bench again and this time I had a max temp of 64 C, again only towards the end of the benchmarks. Most of the time it was high 40s to mid 50s. From what I've been seeing on the boards, an occasional spike into the mid 60s is pretty good compared to what others are getting with this Samsung drive. I'm seeing lots of people complaining of hitting 90 C. I think it starts thermal throttling at 90, right?

Doubt you see any throttling the way you have it setup unless you write 50GB+ in one go...and you probably get away with that too.

Interestingly Asus is the only manufacturer thus far to NOT offer an x399 board in the ATX form factor...only E-ATX. Some people are even avoiding them for it, but their threadripper boards do look less overpopulated than others'.

 

[batboy]

Bring on the E-ATX, my 15 year old tower case has the extra row of stand-off holes for the extended.

I have a high speed 40mm fan around here somewhere. I personally think that m.2 drive will be ok the way it is, but the scientist in me wants to try all options to see what the data shows. I have a RAM cooler from G.Skill that has two fans in a little frame deal that sits over your RAM modules (it came in the package with RAM sticks). I put the RAM cooler up as close to the sink as possible and turned it on. I left the side cover off, so I no longer had the side fans blowing in, but the RAM cooler was blowing straight onto the m.2 sink and the front case fan was still running of course. I ran the benchmarks again and there was no change in temp. Still seeing a max temp of 64 C (brief time spend in the 60s).

I don't think active cooling is going to do anything for me. If I had crappy case ventilation, then yeah maybe.

 

[Nebulous]

If you didn't see any change in temps, then yeah, it's as good as it's gonna get. I'd doubt you'll see 60c+ unless you're doing large file transfers, but for evryday use, it'll be fine with current temps.

The PNY drive runs extremely hot and tho the specs show nominal operating temps of 0°C ~ 65°C, this sucker runs well beyond the 65c supposed safe temps. Without a sink or any type of cooling, my temps hovered in the high 60's to low 70's with an occasional spike into the 80's. Stereo555's drive runs even hotter. We had to put some sort of cooling on them or they'll fry for sure.

Stereo555's drive temps with just the sink alone run between 50's to close to 65c. I don't understand why PNY would make a drive with safe nominal temps specs @ 65c when the dang thing runs hotter than that is beyond me and not include some sort of heatsink as an accessory.