SSD Cooling Tower Reduces Temps by 50 Percent

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.

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.

Continue reading

Pfizer Claims New COVID-19 Vaccine 90 Percent Effective

There have been a number of COVID-19 vaccines in development in the United States and around the world, and one of them has shown some very positive preliminary results in its Phase 3 trial. One particular vaccine developed by Pfizer and German firm BioNTech appears to be more than 90 percent effective in preventing symptomatic…

Apple’s New M1 SoC Looks Great, Is Not Faster Than 98 Percent of PC Laptops

Apple's new M1 silicon really looks amazing, but it isn't faster than 98 percent of the PCs sold last year, despite what the company claims.

Space Mining Gets 400 Percent Boost From Bacteria, ISS Experiments Show

We'll need lots of raw materials to sustain human endeavors on other planets, and a new project on the International Space Station demonstrates how we can make space mining over 400 percent more efficient.

Cyberpunk 2077’s PC Player Base Has Shrunk 79 Percent Since Launch

CD Projekt Red's latest game has seen a steep player drop off — steeper than usual for a game of this size — but it's probably not a problem for the title long-term.