ADATA has presented a truly impressive Gen5 SSD at Computex, the first on the market with liquid cooling and a giant-sized heatsink.
Gen5 SSDs continue to hit the market offering another level leap in performance. This increase in speed in a format as small as M.2 has increased the temperature of the units compared to previous generations , which makes it necessary to use cooling , at least with the passive heatsinks that we can find in the units themselves or those that are included in most of the latest generation motherboards.
Some manufacturers are mounting active cooling and its corresponding fans. Models such as the SPATIUM M570 PRO also presented at the Taiwan fair and the fastest seen so far with data transfers of over 14 Gbytes per second, is a sample of these designs, since it includes its own chassis, heatsink and a large fan.
The fans are effective, but they can be quite noisy and annoying. And some designs will need additional power. It’s not ideal, but it looks like they’re going to end up being required when looking for the best performance. Tests with Gen5 SSDs like the Crucial T700 have shown a dramatic performance drop when not properly cooled and other manufacturers are looking for solutions for their entire storage pool.
Liquid Cooled Gen5 SSD
ADATA has taken the bull by the horns and created a liquid cooling system to cool its solid state drives, the first of its kind. Under the code name ‘NeonStorm’, its design includes a transparent casing that absorbs heat through a refrigerant. An aluminum alloy tube inside efficiently transfers heat between air and liquid, while two fans on each side dissipate heat.
All these components sit on a special heat sink and plate, which minimize thermal resistance. The company claims that it outperforms traditional heat sinks by 20 percent, enough to stably achieve the promised performance, more than 14 GB/s in sequential reads and 12 GB/s in writes.
The design is impressive and its size is enormous , but it indicates that the top of the range in solid state drives will look for this type of cooling system. ADATA’s model uses the SM2508 controller, a Silicon Motion compatible with NVMe 2.0. The manufacturer will market it with storage capacities of up to 8 Tbytes. We do not know a release date or price.