Does your Samsung 990 Pro nvme get hot? Mine used to.

Feek · 1 Sep 2023 at 09:16

A few weeks ago, I bought these two.

I put one inside the other using the supplied thermal pad and made sure there was a good contact between the pad, the nvme and the case. I'm using them on my Mac Studio, it's a great combo, really quick and can sustain around 2800-2900Mbps transfer rate. I copy large chunks of data to and from it a few times a day.

I noticed that while copying, it got hot. Very hot. It wasn't too hot to touch but it was very uncomfortable to rest a finger on the case for more than a few seconds. Even at idle, it sat feeling very warm. Now I'm sure this is within spec but I don't like it when things get to that sort of temperature.

So I looked around and picked up a heatsink for less than six quid.

All I've done is use a couple of cable ties to fix the heatsink to the enclosure. I've not used any thermal pads between them so it's not as efficient as it could be. I have pulled the cable ties very tight to get the best conductivity between them I can.

It's not pretty either but I don't care about that. My Mac Studio is mounted under the desk and the enclosure is sitting on a shelf under there. I can't see it at all and what I can't see, I don't care about.

The important thing is that it's cold. The heatsink does a fantastic job, when I'm doing large file copies backwards and forwards, neither the enclosure or the heatsink feel even slightly warm to the touch. I have an IR temperature gun and it shows that the enclosure is just a couple of degrees above ambient room temperature.

I said it's not pretty, I wasn't kidding:

But if you have one of these drives in an enclosure that gets warmer than you'd like, it's a decent solution.

Murphy · 1 Sep 2023 at 09:56

Love it when people jerry-rig heatsinks to things, I've always saved those extruded ali heatsinks as you never know when they may come in handy. I cut one up into little 15x15mm blocks once and glued them to the IC's on a GPU once.

FWIW i bought a 990 Pro that Samsung sell with the 'heatsink' built in and currently it's sitting at 44°C vs 38°C for the 970 using the 'heatsink' that came with the MoBo vs 32°C for a HDD. When i re-imaged the 990 i did notice that it got hot, IIRC it was around 55°C but that was last week when the ambient was higher.

Feek · 1 Sep 2023 at 12:16

Murphy said:
Love it when people jerry-rig heatsinks to things,

Heh, you don't want to see what I've done with the Pi4 that I use for aircraft monitoring. It's in a box at the top of my mast so in direct sunlight.

darael · 1 Sep 2023 at 14:15

My 990 Pro sits at 43c with a heatsink installed which was on offer from the retailer at the time. After copying around 60GB of files, it rose to 46c - but the motherboard only has a gen 3 M.2 slot, so speeds were limited to around 2GB/sec.

gtl_racer · 19 Sep 2023 at 11:36

I keep a small collection of random heatsinks for such purposes.. For example: help cool passive laptop with BIG heatsink; htpc with old intel stock heatsink.. :cool:

IanAG · 27 Sep 2023 at 07:36

Have you seen any change in transfer speed with the heatsink added? Curious if it throttles less

Feek · 27 Sep 2023 at 08:08

I didn’t run it for long enough without the heatsink to see it throttle so I can’t answer that, sorry. I’ve never seen it slow down at all.
I’ve just timed a copy, 140 Gb in a fraction over 2 minutes. Multiple files, various sizes.

IanAG · 27 Sep 2023 at 21:09

No problem, I have never done anything approaching scientific testing with my sabrent enclosure either, but it also gets super hot. My biggest issue with speed is my carelessness with keeping track of cables and getting stuck with 200Mbps!

mrk · 27 Sep 2023 at 23:06

All these speedy NVMes get very hot, my Sabrent goes over 65 sometimes and that has a heatsink, though it does sit directly above a 4090 so to be expected. Performance remains A+ though, as will the Samsung. SSDs are designed to run hot, throttling is well under control on drives like these tbh.

Blackjack Davy · 21 Oct 2023 at 05:15

Does anyone have any recommendations for heatsinks for NVMe drives? Main boot drive is under a mobo cover that acts as a heat sink I guess temperatures are fine with that but when adding a second drive as a data drive its naked i.e. with nothing covering it and cloning a drive to it it gets hot, really hot (3 sensors: 61, 61, and 79c) which is too hot for comfort for me

Its ok when idle but when transferring data it gets really hot which apparently they're known for

Rroff · 21 Oct 2023 at 05:26

Depends how much you want to spend - the Be Quiet ones are pretty decent (and people say they work well with the 990 Pro), but I've also just used plain ones with double sided thermal tape with pretty much the same result as the more expensive heatsinks.

Having fun an games with a 990 Pro with factory fitted heatsink :s initially thought I'd just put it in the motherboard top M.2 slot without refitting the motherboard heatsink only to find I'd overlooked that using that slot reduces the PCI-e x16 slot to x8 and it won't fit under the other built in heatspreader that covers the rest of the M.2 connectors which I can't leave off as it also cools the motherboard chipset. Unfortunately no easy way to remove the 990 Pro heatsink without very high chance of damaging the NVME.

Ended up ordering another one without the heatsink - I guess one of my other systems will get an NVME upgrade :s

darael · 21 Oct 2023 at 23:12

Blackjack Davy said:
Does anyone have any recommendations for heatsinks for NVMe drives? Main boot drive is under a mobo cover that acts as a heat sink I guess temperatures are fine with that but when adding a second drive as a data drive its naked i.e. with nothing covering it and cloning a drive to it it gets hot, really hot (3 sensors: 61, 61, and 79c) which is too hot for comfort for me

Its ok when idle but when transferring data it gets really hot which apparently they're known for

I had this Jonsbo heatsink fitted on my 970 EVO Plus and it worked a treat. It cost me about £10 which I don't think is too bad.

Blackjack Davy · 22 Oct 2023 at 19:42

Oh thats quite substantial isn't it I've got something similar on the way I'll see how I get on

darael · 23 Oct 2023 at 19:34

Blackjack Davy said:
Oh thats quite substantial isn't it I've got something similar on the way I'll see how I get on

The heatsink isn't as big as it looks in the images, but it's a little bigger than the heatsink I got on offer when I bought my Samsung 990 Pro.

Cyber-Mav · 25 Oct 2023 at 21:27

thought the usb interface would be enough to limit speed and therefore heat generation.

Blackjack Davy · 28 Oct 2023 at 01:06

Ok so bought a budget one it brought the temperatures down to 42/42/54c that'll do. Was a bit of a hassle to get it to fit on the motherboard as it has a sort of screw in mounting at the far end with a plastic clip that slides into place to secure it try as I may I could not get it to close I ended up using a short screw instead same thread and length just not so quick-fit

Rroff · 28 Oct 2023 at 01:11

I've not put the 990 Pro I have with the factory fitted heatsink to use yet, but I stuck one without the heatsink in my 14700K build under the motherboard heatspreader and it pretty much sits at 41C idle or under sustained loads - at least chucking a few GBs of files at it.

Rroff · 29 Oct 2023 at 17:26

So I set up the factory heat sinked drive - so far the one under the motherboard heat spreader is generally in the range of 36-41C, the factory heat sinked one is 43-56C.

EDIT: Put them under more sustained heavy loads the heat sinked one got up to 59C, the one under the motherboard spreader 48C. In normal use don't get anything close to that.