Seeking input about thermals for NVME SSD placed underneath motherboard

[Maviryk]

For Trent's case specifically, installing the PSU with the fan side up to suck air out from inside of the case sounds like a great idea. It looks like there should also be enough from for large heatsinks, if needed.

 

[trents]

The thing with that is you have to find a way to keep the copper shim in place while the drive sits vertical. It may slide out which will cause problems with the drive.

Not sure what you mean here. The motherboard is parallel to the ground when in the case and the m.2 SSD will also be parallel to the floor when installed.

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If I'm right then these SM based SSD are not heating up as much as Samsung. Other thing is that on back of the case is limited airflow so even though there is no additional heat source then temps can be higher than expected.
Before you start to modify anything or spend money on thermal pads, heatsinks etc, check how it's acting during work. Run soft to have history of max temps and simply use it for couple of hours.
Safe temp for consumer grade electronics is ~85°C.

That's what I'm thinking. Samsung and apparently some PNY m.2 NVME products run hotter than most.

Yes, I am planning on checking actual temps first. No sense in going to a lot of trouble fixing something that doesn't need fixing. The m.2 SSD should arrive in the mail today or tomorrow and when I install it and do some testing I'll have a better idea if additional cooling is needed. I think there is plenty of room under the motherboard for passive cooling via heat sinks if that is needed. The motherboard tray has a big hole in the center and there is maybe 3/4 of an inch of space between the underside of the motherboard and the PSU.

 

[trents]

Got this reply from the drive's tech support when asking about potential thermal problems from having the m.2 NVME on the backside of the motherboard:

Hi,
Any PCIe NVMe will have high temps if there are alot of consecutive read/write actions. With an SSD on the back of a motherboard, it does depend on the air circulation within the tower. We don't have an estimated range of temperatures to expect for the configuration your will be using. The SSD will throttle the speeds once the drive reaches 70 degrees Celsius.

Eluktronics Inc. Customer Service


Doesn't 70c seem like a low TJmax to you guys?

Anyway, drive came today and I installed it and ran CrystalDiskMark. Max temp was 65c. Not sure if that is a good app to test temps with, however.

 

[trents]

Getting definitely faster boot times than with the SATA SSD I was using formerly. Expected that. But what is such as pleasant surprise is how fast the NVME moves large files around from one place to another on the system disk. Moved a Liunx Mint ISO in the blink of an eye.

Also ran AS SSD and got these scores:

 

[HankB]

... But what is such as pleasant surprise is how fast the NVME moves large files around from one place to another on the system disk. Moved a Linux Mint ISO in the blink of an eye.

Unless you're moving it from one filesystem to another, it should just be moving the pointers to the file w/out having to move the file itself.

 

[trents]

I wondered about that too but when I move an even larger file (Windows 10 downloaded ISO) it does take 2-3 seconds, long enough to see the transfer progress graph. I would think if it was just pointers that were changing that would not be the case.

 

[HankB]

I could be wrong about that. Linux and Unix have done that from the beginning. I would have thought that Windows would have caught up by now. It probably depends on which filesystem is in use. FAT and derived filesystems may require copying all of the data but I think that NTFS would just adjust the pointers.

 

[trents]

Seems like NTFS uses pointers sometimes and other times it's a full move of the data when shifting a file to another location on the same partition. It seems to treat different operations differently depending on whether you are deleting, cutting and pasting or copying and pasting and even each of those seems to be treated differently from time to time. There might be some limits to the pointing technology I'm thinking.