NEWS TECHNOLOGIE

(Image: JiuShark) We all love moving into new generations of power and performance on our PCs. Going from DDR4 to DDR5, PCIe 4 to PCIe 5, and so forth is always exciting. However, there’s always one big drawback, and that’s the fact that there’s rarely a free lunch in the world of PC performance. Getting twice the horsepower usually means a lot more heat is produced. That could be the case with next-generation PCIe 5.0 SSDs, which are coming out soon. They promise data transfer rates up to 14GB/s, which is twice the current amount. The cost for that performance will likely be excessive heat, the likes of which we’ve never seen with SSDs before. To keep that heat at bay companies are introducing radical SSD cooling solutions. The latest is an active cooling heatsink/fan combo that could have been used on a GPU many years ago.

The tower cooler is manufactured by a Chinese company named JiuShark. The cooler was posted to Twitter by a user named SI-129. It is oddly yet simply named M.2 Three and is designed to offer extreme SSD cooling. The word extreme is no hyperbole either. According to benchmark charts posted by Tom’s Hardware, it offers dramatic reductions in SSD temps. The chart shows a Samsung 980 Pro running at 71C with its stock heatsink. With the M.2 Three in passive mode (no fan), that drops to a comfortable 49C. With the fan active, temps drop further to a chilly 33C. Temperature improvements for the SSD controller are even larger. The company says the 980 Pro will hit 92C in stock trim, but passive mode takes that down to 57C. Turning on the fan drops it all the way down to 40C.

(Image: JiuShark)

The cooler measures 82mm tall and 74.5mm long. As the benchmarks note, the fan is optional but it doesn’t seem like it would add much noise. It spins up to 3,000 rpm and pushes 14 CFM at 25.4 dBa. That’s equivalent to what we consider a “quiet” air cooler for a CPU. It also makes us wonder if we’ll get to the point with these things where we’ll need a dual-fan, push-pull configuration. The fan can be mounted on either side of the aluminum heatsink, and is just 60mm thick. It has 27 fins and a single copper heat-pipe with a nickel coating running through it.

Pricing for this little guy is just around $13 USD when converted from yuan. All this leads to the inevitable question: is this something people would even consider for their SSD? The natural answer seems to be they would, if it required it, but therein lies the rub. Our SSDs have never really needed this level of cooling before. However, the Samsung 980 Pro is a PCIe 4.0 SSD, and if it’s hitting those temps now we shudder to think what the next-gen might bring.

However, companies will also be boosting efficiency for PCIe 5.0 SSDs to combat the rising heat levels. It’s not a given at this point that next-gen SSDs will require active cooling. For example, Phison has said it would be reducing the number of enterprise PCIe lanes from eight to four to reduce power consumption by 30 percent. It also said it’s moving from a 16nm process to a 7nm process. The Phison executive said he absolutely expects PCIe 5.0 enterprise SSDs to have active cooling. However, he said its consumer drives will just use a heatsink like current drives. PCIe 5.0 SSDs will arrive in the near future, so we’ll be able to better understand their cooling needs.

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