Looking for tips & suggestions with Silicone Thermal Pads on M2 NVMe drives.

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Here’s my circumstance and what I’ve done:

I am repurposing two 256 GB 980EVO NVMe drives (formally windows boot C drives) for plain file storage using Orico enclosures. The enclosures came with a Thermal Pad to attach to the drive after it’s connected and positioned in the enclosure.

The pad attachment directions were vague, but after some digging, it became apparent to first peel off the heavier plastic strip, flip the pad over soft side down and lay it on top of the mounted NVMe. Applying light pressure across the pad secured it to the drive chips. I then re-attached the heat sink top to the Orico enclosure.

I then “cleaned” the two drives and created a single NTFS partition using Diskpart in a CMD window. I copied 175 GB of data to both drives. The heat sink seemed to do its job and the enclosures got quite hot. I don’t think drives were throttling upload speeds, but don’t know for sure.

Tips and suggestions please.

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In a computer you have a fan to cool the components so a thermal pad and heatsink makes sense in a “sealed” enclosure.
Do you have a temperature probe to put on the heatsink?

cheers, Paul

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Do you have a temperature probe to put on the heatsink?

Yes, I do.  Didn’t think of it.  Great suggestion.  It will be easy to do on these enclosures.  I’ll post back results.  Thanks Paul T.

Results (Fahrenheit) midway during upload of 183 GB folder:

Doesn’t seem dangerously high to me.  Your take?

 

 

Desktop mobo Asus TUF X299 Mark 1, CPU: Intel Core i7-7820X Skylake-X 8-Core 3.6 GHz, RAM: 32GB, GPU: Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti 4GB. Display: Four 27" 1080p screens 2 over 2 quad.

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The idle temp for NVMe drives should be between 40 — 50°C (104 — 122°F) so your temp reading shows a drive that’s barely even getting a work out.

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TechTango

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Add 10C to get the on chip temps and you still only get 50C. Not even raising a sweat!

cheers, Paul

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TechTango

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Even in the enclosures, the drives should expose the internal temp sensors to the operating system.

Keep in mind that during extended writes, the drives will throttle even if the temps are within range. Once the SLC cache is used up, the drive write speed will drop to the native write speed of the rest of the NAND. After the write ends, the drive will recover on its own while it is powered on. Some do this quickly, others take much longer.

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TechTango, satrow

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Ascaris wrote:

Even in the enclosures, the drives should expose the internal temp sensors to the operating system.

The problem with external drives in enclosures is a lot of tools (especially the ones that come built-in with Windows) have trouble accessing a drive’s smart data/sensors over a “USB interface“.

A free 3rd party tool that does work with Windows is GSmartControl.

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TechTango

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All replies helpful.  Thanks much.

Desktop mobo Asus TUF X299 Mark 1, CPU: Intel Core i7-7820X Skylake-X 8-Core 3.6 GHz, RAM: 32GB, GPU: Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti 4GB. Display: Four 27" 1080p screens 2 over 2 quad.

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