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  • Michael Bay - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link

    What`s the point of such pad if there is no radiator afterwards?
  • Shadowmaster625 - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link

    Right. What is the point of thermally coupling the SSD to the pcb, which is just soldermask covering a layer of epoxy? You want the pad on the top, and then you want a piece of aluminum on top of that. That's how you cool something. Heck, why not just stick a VRM cooler onto each chip?
  • ddriver - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link

    The goal is to use the PCB as a heat sink. It is dumb, but it will have a tangible effect. I bet those pads will cost a ridiculous amount of money for what they are. Note that those pads are not adhesive, they are just pads.

    It would cost a few bucks to get a small radiator or even just a piece of aluminum and glue it to the SSD top using them 3m double sided thermally conductive adhesive tapes. And it will work much better too.
  • III-V - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link

    If it's more thermally conductive than air... well there you go. This looks like it transfers heat to the PCB below, which is chock full of copper, and certainly much cooler.
  • Bullwinkle J Moose - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link

    "This looks like it transfers heat to the PCB below, which is chock full of copper, and certainly much cooler."
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    It's too thick

    How about taking the dimensions of the pad and cutting a thin copper (or alum) sheet about 2.5 times the width of a single pad and the same length as the pad above

    Fold copper sheet down the entire length in the middle and glue a tiny copper or aluminum pipe (heatpipe) aprox 2.8" long (avail at your local hobby/craft store) inside the entire length of the fold to draw heat from the copper foil

    you could make short cuts in the copper sheet from the outside edge directly towards the heatpipe in the center fold so the heat could only flow in one direction towards the copper pipe from the chips and NOT flow from chip to chip

    Clip the heat sink over the M.2 SSD as if it were a money clip and use that thick insulating pad you bought from Silverstone to insulate the motherboard below your REAL heat sink

    Total cost?
    About $2
  • meacupla - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link

    Are you sure that's going to fit between the usual places where M.2 SSD sits?
    By usual places, I mean between PCIe slots and back side of mobo.

    And some of these mobos coming with their own M.2 heatsinks end up interfering with popular aftermarket heatsinks
  • Diji1 - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link

    I don't think you understand what a heat pipe is.
  • Bullwinkle J Moose - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link

    "I don't think you understand what a heat pipe is."
    -----------------------------------------------------------------
    Fine, lets call it a heat sponge, heat sink or a heat thingy

    It draws heat from the metal sheet and radiates that heat across the internal surface area as well as across the external metal sheet

    If it doesn't fit in the usual places a M.2 slot goes, then motherboard manufacturers are making it wrong

    Start designing motherboards right or stick with SATA
  • LordOfTheBoired - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 - link

    Ummm, heat radiated to the interior won't help. Because it will be reabsorbed by that same interior. It is not remotely the same as a fin stack on a conventional heatsink because a fin stack sees a lot of airflow, while the inside of a long narrow tube will see almost none. Real heat pipes (in addition to being far more complex than an empty tube) are not used to dissipate heat, but to transfer it into the fin stack where it CAN be dissipated.
  • Ninhalem - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link

    Alright so this solution that Silverstone has come up with isn't going to work very well. Printed Circuit Board (PCB) has a very low thermal conductivity rate (k) of something like 0.30 W/m-K [Watts per meter-Kelvin]. Putting this silicon pad between the drive and the PCB will result in some heat being transferred from the drive to pad, however, once the heat energy is in the pad, that heat has no where to go. The PCB acts as an insulator. Yes, the PCB does have copper in it, but the majority of the material in PCB is FR-4 glass epoxy (glass fiber).

    So once the heat is in the pad, normally you would have air blowing over the pad to induce forced external convection with the air. Since, there's not a whole lot of air being moved relatively near this pad, you don't have forced convection, you now have natural convection. The rate of heat transfer between these two different modes of convective heat transfer is quite large. So now, what you have with this pad is closer to retaining the heat than getting rid of the heat.

    The solution is to move the pad to the top of the drive instead of between the drive and the PCB, so that the pad has access to more natural and forced convection. The rate of natural convection depends on the surface area that is exposed. If the pad is between these objects, the surface area exposed is just the thin sides, but if placed on top, the surface area is the entire top in addition the thin sides. In addition to placing the pad on top, placing a metal (aluminum/copper) finned block on top of the silicon pad would increase the heat transfer to the surrounding air. Fins increase the available surface area, which then increases the convective heat transfer rate.

    Disclaimer: I work with FEA thermal analysis (steady state and transient) in ANSYS every day.
  • Bullwinkle J Moose - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link

    Ninhalem says....
    "The solution is to move the pad to the top of the drive instead of between the drive and the PCB, so that the pad has access to more natural and forced convection."
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The image above shows a VERY thick insulator which you now want to place on top of the SSD?

    You will still be holding the heat in, but at the top instead of the bottom

    Several DRAM modules use a sort of moneyclip type of heat sink I described above to good effect while others use a single (one sided) sink

    The best solution is probably the easiest and best looking.....
    wrap the M.2 SSD's with a metal "full contact" case at the factory to protect and cool the chips and start building motherboards that fully support them
  • Ninhalem - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link

    I think you missed the part in the article where the silicone material in question is referred to as a conductor of heat. The material has a thermal conductivity rate of 4 W/m-K. The PCB on the other hand is in the vicinity of 0.3.
  • edzieba - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link

    Put one on the backside, and couple the SSD to the motherboard PCB, which is chock-full of copper planes. Stick one on the frontside, and couple it to the motherboard support plate. Either way, an m.2 SSD puts out a tiny amount of heat. Single-digit watts, not even hitting 5W at peak in Anandtech's testing.
  • ddriver - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link

    That's not true for NVME. Sub 5W chips do not need any cooling, and could not possibly overheat to the point of throttling back. The 512gb 950 pro has been measured to go over 7 watts.
  • Samus - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link

    This isn't a heatsink it is a heat spreader. This concept has been used for decades. And it works alright, it didn't going to reduce the temps to anywhere near ambient, but using the pcb as additional thermal surface area is a common application for TIM's (thermal insulation materials) because in most cases, pcb's just don't get hot because the heat producing components are, with the exception of videocards and the like, mounted off the pcb, especially riser cards like those m.2 SSD's will find themselves in. Yet pcb's tollorate heat pretty well.
  • Gasaraki88 - Friday, July 14, 2017 - link

    Actually Dell has been putting these pads on their SSDs without any heatsink on them. I guess it works on air cooling also.
  • zodiacfml - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link

    Ridiculous.
  • siuol11 - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link

    It's much better to get FujiPoly's xtreme cooling pads with similar dimensions (you can choose between .5, 1, and 1.5mm heights as well). Fujipoly's pads have a cooling capacity of 17w/m.K, which is over an order of magnitude more than these.
  • Death666Angel - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link

    "Fujipoly's pads have a cooling capacity of 17w/m.K, which is over an order of magnitude more than these."
    So, 17 is more than 10 times 4?
  • yannigr2 - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link

    you can buy a 10x10 cm thermal pad for about 1-2 dollars on eBay. this one will probably cost 5 times more because of the Silverstone brand on it.
  • Vatharian - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link

    Literally one M.2 SSD (951 and 950 are virtually the same) suffers from throttling, and whole new class of products are shipped. Way to go. I have 950 Pro, and I haven't, and I will never notice the throttling, since I am not sitting with my nose in the benchmarks. I have work to do.
  • Billy Tallis - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link

    The Samsung 950 pro is not at all unique in its thermal behavior. It's certainly not the hottest M.2 NVMe SSD and it is not the most susceptible to thermal throttling. ALL of the M.2 NVMe SSDs I've tested so far hit a thermal limit during at least one of the synthetic benchmarks. None of them throttle during ordinary desktop usage.
  • BrokenCrayons - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link

    Like many others, I find the claims pretty dubious, though I'm inclined to trust SilverStone moreso than a lot of other companies that would make the same claim. It does look a lot like any other space-filling thermal pad that I've seen used in laptops in various places. Is AT planning any kind of testing for this thing?
  • vladx - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 - link

    Indeed I would also be interested in that. Care to comment on that, @Billy Tallis?
  • Laststop311 - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link

    Highly skeptical of this product. A thermal pad does no good if the pad is not connected to a heat sink to allow the heat to be dissipated. Maybe if they were double sided adhesive thermal pads that allowed you to pop on copper heatsinks above the highest heat producing parts and give it IC a little more surface area to dissipate heat.

    The proper solution is for companies to design custom heat sinks for all their fast nvme drives. Put a little R and D into it and find the absolute coolest design and go with that, preferably made from nickel plated copper.
  • Arbie - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link

    "Launching" a small strip of plastic? A little more perspective, please.
  • Lolimaster - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link

    86 or 71° after fix should not be permitted. How hard is to simply offer the m.2 with a low profile heatsink?

    It's like you're running a really low power gpu with no cooling at all.
  • Lolimaster - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link

    So m.2 ssd's add another huge source of heat to your pc...
  • BrokenCrayons - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link

    Is "huge source of heat" sarcasm? NVMe SSDs use more power and thus generate more heat than SATA SSDs and focus that heat in a smaller area, but even at peak workloads I don't think they'd be something you could consider a huge source of heat. Compared to a even a low budget GTX 1050 or even a mobile CPU, they're still generating a much smaller amount of heat.
  • HomeworldFound - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link

    I wonder how worthwhile all of this is. If you have a dedicated graphics card or even two, surely they create the turbulence and airflow to remove the heat away from the M.2 area anyway. Add a few case fans, a PSU fan and a radiator or some kind.. is it even that much to worry about?
  • Impulses - Saturday, February 25, 2017 - link

    Well, the cards also heat up the air around the drive, so it's debatable how much help vs hurt they bring. Proper front to back case airflow does go a long way tho.
  • HomeworldFound - Saturday, February 25, 2017 - link

    Good point.
  • MR_Roberto - Monday, February 27, 2017 - link

    whats the difference in this vs Electrical tape? wouldn't some electrical tape do the same job, its thick enough

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