I think I could only see this being useful if you were building a system loaded with SSDs in the PCIe slots; in a system with a GPU I'd expect the extra heat from that will easily result in worse performance than keeping the M.2 drive on the motherboard.
In fact, for a single M.2 SSD system my preference is a motherboard with an M.2 slot on the back; this keeps it away from the worst heat generating components, and even though few cases provide proper airflow on the back of the motherboard, as long as your cooling is adequate it should never get too hot for the drive.
Even if you are building a system with a ton of SSDs, the main benefit is having the PCIe adapter IMO, it doesn't seem like the heatsink makes such a big difference that you're ever really going to notice it.
Yeah I agree. But they will figure out how to get more capacity at lower costs packed onto the size factor soon enough. I just built a new Skylake build for my living room HTPC/Xbox one look a like, and I used the Samsung EVO m.2 drive. What a refreshing piece of hardware. Just clipping it onto the motherboard like RAM and not dealing with any cables whatsoever made me feel like I was living in the future. Can't believe how far HDDs have come since I started building computers in the mid-90s.
The only reason consumer SSDs are 2.5" is because that's what the space is. If you had a 1.8" drive slot, and 1.8" drives, then SSDs would be smaller. They are the size they are because 2.5" was around for mechanical drives before SSDs, so it allows drop in replacement.
The problem with M2 is that you end up having a space limitation because you need to free up space on the motherboard to put the thing, which means either you skip something else, or you have a larger motherboard, and then you aren't really saving any space anyway.
Using the 1.8" HDD form factor probably would have impacted higher end drives in prior years. It only has 60% of the areal size of a 2.5" model; and until fairly recently most high performance/capacity SSDs; used a full size 2.5" PCB. The only ones that were using cut down boards that would fit into a 1.8" housing without needing shrunk were lower end budget models. While it doesn't matter much now (Samsung's 2tb models use smaller PCBs that look like they'd almost fit in the smaller form factor unchanged); cropping off the largest size from the market a few years ago would've probably hurt adoption.
I fail to see a good reason why SSDs have to become more expensive if you remove their case. Anything on that M.2 card is also in a 2.5" drive, yet it's no problem to fit the components onto that small PCB (as long as you're not trying to make very large drives).
Having LED's on this product will only help sales if it is full RGB so people can adjust the lighting to match their system. Mix/Match lights is a major detraction/distraction for people who go to great lengths to color coordinate their systems.
Irregardless of your high minded comment, what I stated was in fact true. They decided, more than likely, that LED's would help with sales because gamers and enthusiast love LED's...but a little more thoughtful digging into things would reveal that the ability to color coordinate is pivotal when adding LEDs into system builds. Those kids in Africa are thrilled with your monthly monetary contribution, btw. There should be more people like you in the world.
You know, since the LED's are white... you could, y'know... buy a translucent material of the color of your choice and cover the card LED's with that and get the desired effect... without pestering the company to pander to waste money on that many RGB LED's at which you'd complain about the lack of a competitive price and not buy it anyway followed by you buying one without that is cheaper and buying a an LED strip yourself and attaching it...
Tell the Nobel committee about it. The 2014 prize in physics went to the blue boys -- red and green had been around for a while, and only they made white possible: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/lau...
Whilst agreeing with your point, you want either 'irrespective' or 'regardless', not "irregardless".
More on topic I agree with both of you - I both recognize that what Teizo says about the customer base is probably true, and also agree with mooninite's despair that this is so. The two posts are not incompatible.
I think these tests answer another important question: when does it overheat. As it is, the drives only overheat during sustained write. This is far from unexpected, but at the same time it is reassuring to know it is the only scenario where a drive would throttle (as opposed to throttling under regular desktop usage).
But what about another important question, how much does it "hurt" to add a dollar worth of aluminum to improve a product worth several hundred dollars?
If you have ever installed an M.2 drive, then you know there's not much space left for a heatsink. And you can only install it on one side. Even so, it's so close to the motherboard (and usually between PCIe slots) that if you don't have a hell of an airflow, it won't make much difference anyway. And that's only for desktops, good luck trying to fit a M.2 drive with a heatsink attached into an ultrabook.
You are very limited conceptually - it doesn't have to be a "radiator" type of heatsink, a flat piece of aluminum 2-3 mm thick would suffice. Heatsinks come in various shapes and sizes, not necessary the bulky, thick finned design.
The SSD doesn't displace a lot of heat to begin with, but without a heatsink for that HEAT to SINK into the bare chip quickly runs out of thermal room.
Even if it still throttles, it will ramp the temp up slower as the heatsink will act as a buffer, and regardless of how little airflow it may have, a larger piece of aluminum will always displace much more heat than a tiny chip.
It will be slower to overheat and faster to cool, even in an ultrabook or tablet, and yes, with the kind of heatsink it merits it will have no trouble fitting into portable devices.
Judging by the performance regressions from adding a heatsink to the larger model, it would seem that engineers were well aware it throttles and have optimized the product for it, so taking care of the heat puts the device in a less than optimal standing. A firmware update should be enough to address this issue and eliminate any sort of performance regressions and actually improve it somewhat. Engineering a product which runs worse with better cooling - that's kind of an epic fail.
Unless it detects benchmarks and lets the controller clock higher for better scores.If VW can do it , the possibility needs to be investigated elsewhere too.
They're really more like ducts than fins as designed. What air does manage to enter the heatsink will not all flow across the entire drive. Some of the fresh cool air will bypass part of the drive, and some of it will just be cooling the heatsink itself. It looks like a design that would be very effective with a lot of airflow, but the intake is pretty small.
Great write-up Billy, I appreciate you running the full battery of tests again and re-addressing the Bench scores... A review of a heatsink feels somewhat incomplete without a single temperature measurement tho! SMART readings or something taken with a simple IR thermometer would've been helpful, specially to the kind of DIY'er that's likely to buy this. I'm curious if i can replicate comparable results with a simple stick on heatsink and some airflow, it's particularly relevant for those of us with multiple GPUs where the add in card might put the drive in just as bad of a spot but the M.2 slot might be exposed to more airflow.
Unfortunately, the only high-quality thermometer I have is the temperature probe for the multimeter that was busy doing the power measurements. I'll be getting some kind of thermometer soon, and I'm open to suggestions of something with data logging capability. Otherwise I'll get a cheap IR thermometer and you'll have to be satisfied with just a few spot readings instead of the full graph we'd both rather see.
I wonder if you could compare the performance of this heatsink versus just pointing a quiet 80mm fan at the drive? More moving air can have the same effect as much larger surface area, especially if we're only talking about half a watt extra required to reach full performance.
So, basically they just need an extension cable/riser for the M.2 slot (they can do it for normal pci-e slot, these are basically the same thing but smaller) so you can relocate the drive in a normal drive bay to keep it cooled off. Or if they started out with something like a real cable going to a slightly modified M.2 connector that would be purposed for just drives on the board in the first place they could make normal 2.5" size drives with the new connector, 2TB+, and all the advantages that goes with being bigger and able to be placed like a normal drive. If you don't have the space, the small boards could still have the universal M.2 slot they have now for the bubblegum stick size drives but would just have to put up with the heat.
Of course there is enough space: the chip packages themselves. It won't work in a laptop, but for a desktop some simple small memory heatsinks should do the trick just as well. for 5$ (aluminum is sufficient instead of copper) instad of 75$. And never mind if the heat sink overlaps the chips a bit, just make sure it doesn't short anything on the mainboard (use some insulation tape as needed).
Final words page, should the with and without heatsinks be flipped? If it was thermally shackled, should the higher bar not be for the one *with* the heatsink and not without?
That is actually correct. The drives are more consistent when they thermally throttle because the controller has plenty of time to catch up. Whereas with a heatsink they're running at full tilt, and sometimes the controller has trouble keeping things consistent.
During thermal throttling, the 256GB was occasionally stuttering and dropping from 6k IOPS to 2k IOPS. That tanked the consistency score. The 512GB's performance regulation when thermally throttled was basically perfect—during steady state it never deviated from ~6k IOPS.
I really don't get why so many people seem to love M.2 so much. Sure it's convenient for laptops but for just about anything else it's a severely limited form factor restricting capacity and adding heat issues while eating up precious expansion slot space on the motherboard. What I'd really like to see are U.2 SSDs with 10 times the capacity.
The performance is obvious plateauing with that heatsink, so it begs the question: what is good enough? I assume it's just the controller that needs to be cooled. Would one of those tiny chipset heatsinks with some thermal tape still see most, if not all, the benefit of this Angelbird heatsink?
Given sufficient airflow, I think one of those small heatsinks could get the job done. I don't think most M.2 slots or adapters put the drive in a position to receive that much airflow unless your case is already a serious wind tunnel.
I was looking at it as making a PCIe slot into an M.2 slot into which you'd insert the drive, as opposed to thinking of it as something modifying the drive. I can see how a consumer pairing it with a particular drive would take the other perspective, but to me the adapter is the permanent part of the testbed and the drives are transient occupants.
With most Skylake ITX boards having the m.2 slot on the back, it would be interesting to see how well a simple coupling of the drive to the motherboard backplate with an adhesive thermal pad compares to the bare drive (and/or to a dedicated PCIe slot heatsink like this). I suspect the relatively tiny power levels involved (barely over 5W at most) would mean a nice sheet of aluminium or steel would be more than enough heatsinking for even sustained heavy loads.
Performance of these drives are awesome that I would never be able to throttle them even if I try. Regarding the form factor, I believe they have designed it really well. It might be too big in 5 to years from now.
Just installed my PX1 with a Samsung SM951 as my boot drive. The PX1 seems to be very well constructed in my opinion. Easy to put the SM951 chip in and then install into computer.The white LED's were a surprise. Since I'm not a gamer, to me the leds are just an indication that power is going to the board. I monitored the heat using a couple software apps and at first glance without stressing it, it is hovering around 90 degrees F. Performance r/w is right around 1450 MBs +/-
Overall for a couple days testing, I am very very happy with this combination as a boot drive. Totally changed my overall system profile in a very positive way.
Just bought two of these and in RAID0, they are a beast ! Made the same bentches and putting a raspberry heatsink on each of the M2 controller simply avoids any heat issue (had to remote part of the sticker for that, which was very easy) I would recommend these drives anytime, performance is superb!
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Haravikk - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
I think I could only see this being useful if you were building a system loaded with SSDs in the PCIe slots; in a system with a GPU I'd expect the extra heat from that will easily result in worse performance than keeping the M.2 drive on the motherboard.In fact, for a single M.2 SSD system my preference is a motherboard with an M.2 slot on the back; this keeps it away from the worst heat generating components, and even though few cases provide proper airflow on the back of the motherboard, as long as your cooling is adequate it should never get too hot for the drive.
Even if you are building a system with a ton of SSDs, the main benefit is having the PCIe adapter IMO, it doesn't seem like the heatsink makes such a big difference that you're ever really going to notice it.
vFunct - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
This is going to be mostly useful in servers, where sustained (non-burst) read/write is typical.Ethos Evoss - Saturday, December 26, 2015 - link
Now new NVMe M.2 SSDs NEED heatsink totally bcos PCIe 3.0 x4 has very very high bandwidth and generates 100 C degrees celsius !Ethos Evoss - Saturday, December 26, 2015 - link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3GlInzvHr8frowertr - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
Really think M.2 is the future. No cables and small size sounds like a winner to me.ImSpartacus - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
It's probably the future, but it'll take a while to get there.If you need a cheap ssd for a boring boot drive, then 2.5" is the way to go if you have anything close to resembling a budget.
frowertr - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
Yeah I agree. But they will figure out how to get more capacity at lower costs packed onto the size factor soon enough. I just built a new Skylake build for my living room HTPC/Xbox one look a like, and I used the Samsung EVO m.2 drive. What a refreshing piece of hardware. Just clipping it onto the motherboard like RAM and not dealing with any cables whatsoever made me feel like I was living in the future. Can't believe how far HDDs have come since I started building computers in the mid-90s.Lonyo - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
The only reason consumer SSDs are 2.5" is because that's what the space is. If you had a 1.8" drive slot, and 1.8" drives, then SSDs would be smaller. They are the size they are because 2.5" was around for mechanical drives before SSDs, so it allows drop in replacement.The problem with M2 is that you end up having a space limitation because you need to free up space on the motherboard to put the thing, which means either you skip something else, or you have a larger motherboard, and then you aren't really saving any space anyway.
DanNeely - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
Using the 1.8" HDD form factor probably would have impacted higher end drives in prior years. It only has 60% of the areal size of a 2.5" model; and until fairly recently most high performance/capacity SSDs; used a full size 2.5" PCB. The only ones that were using cut down boards that would fit into a 1.8" housing without needing shrunk were lower end budget models. While it doesn't matter much now (Samsung's 2tb models use smaller PCBs that look like they'd almost fit in the smaller form factor unchanged); cropping off the largest size from the market a few years ago would've probably hurt adoption.MrSpadge - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
I fail to see a good reason why SSDs have to become more expensive if you remove their case. Anything on that M.2 card is also in a 2.5" drive, yet it's no problem to fit the components onto that small PCB (as long as you're not trying to make very large drives).Refuge - Tuesday, December 22, 2015 - link
It is supply and demand, not just charge 10% more than BoM on our entire product catalogue. Loljoex4444 - Tuesday, December 22, 2015 - link
You're also changing the interface from SATA-III to PCIe 3.0 x4. One of these things is mature and common as dirt, one of them is not.Ethos Evoss - Sunday, December 27, 2015 - link
I already have it on the laptop :)damianrobertjones - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
It's the future... until they change it due to wanting people to spend more $$$$ to replace what they already have.TelstarTOS - Wednesday, December 23, 2015 - link
Not at all. U.2 is the future. M2 drives capacity is crippled.Teizo - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
Having LED's on this product will only help sales if it is full RGB so people can adjust the lighting to match their system. Mix/Match lights is a major detraction/distraction for people who go to great lengths to color coordinate their systems.mooninite - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
Meanwhile there are starving children in Africa. Geeze...tipoo - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
You could say that about practically everything on sites like this, so kindly get off that high horse.Teizo - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
Irregardless of your high minded comment, what I stated was in fact true. They decided, more than likely, that LED's would help with sales because gamers and enthusiast love LED's...but a little more thoughtful digging into things would reveal that the ability to color coordinate is pivotal when adding LEDs into system builds. Those kids in Africa are thrilled with your monthly monetary contribution, btw. There should be more people like you in the world.Demiurge - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
You know, since the LED's are white... you could, y'know... buy a translucent material of the color of your choice and cover the card LED's with that and get the desired effect... without pestering the company to pander to waste money on that many RGB LED's at which you'd complain about the lack of a competitive price and not buy it anyway followed by you buying one without that is cheaper and buying a an LED strip yourself and attaching it...RealBeast - Monday, December 28, 2015 - link
"You know, since the LED's are white" Not really.Tell the Nobel committee about it. The 2014 prize in physics went to the blue boys -- red and green had been around for a while, and only they made white possible: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/lau...
h4rm0ny - Tuesday, December 22, 2015 - link
Whilst agreeing with your point, you want either 'irrespective' or 'regardless', not "irregardless".More on topic I agree with both of you - I both recognize that what Teizo says about the customer base is probably true, and also agree with mooninite's despair that this is so. The two posts are not incompatible.
Murloc - Tuesday, December 22, 2015 - link
-less = withoutir- = in- before an 'r', the same as English un- (in- is latin, un- is germanic), it has a negative or privative force.
pick one but not both.
That said, RGB LEDs would make it cost too much, the price is already too high for consumers.
ddriver - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
DO'H, it is not rocket science, if it overheads and throttles back as a result, then it obviously needs a heat sink.bug77 - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
I think these tests answer another important question: when does it overheat.As it is, the drives only overheat during sustained write. This is far from unexpected, but at the same time it is reassuring to know it is the only scenario where a drive would throttle (as opposed to throttling under regular desktop usage).
ddriver - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
But what about another important question, how much does it "hurt" to add a dollar worth of aluminum to improve a product worth several hundred dollars?bug77 - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
If you have ever installed an M.2 drive, then you know there's not much space left for a heatsink. And you can only install it on one side. Even so, it's so close to the motherboard (and usually between PCIe slots) that if you don't have a hell of an airflow, it won't make much difference anyway.And that's only for desktops, good luck trying to fit a M.2 drive with a heatsink attached into an ultrabook.
ddriver - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
You are very limited conceptually - it doesn't have to be a "radiator" type of heatsink, a flat piece of aluminum 2-3 mm thick would suffice. Heatsinks come in various shapes and sizes, not necessary the bulky, thick finned design.The SSD doesn't displace a lot of heat to begin with, but without a heatsink for that HEAT to SINK into the bare chip quickly runs out of thermal room.
Even if it still throttles, it will ramp the temp up slower as the heatsink will act as a buffer, and regardless of how little airflow it may have, a larger piece of aluminum will always displace much more heat than a tiny chip.
It will be slower to overheat and faster to cool, even in an ultrabook or tablet, and yes, with the kind of heatsink it merits it will have no trouble fitting into portable devices.
Judging by the performance regressions from adding a heatsink to the larger model, it would seem that engineers were well aware it throttles and have optimized the product for it, so taking care of the heat puts the device in a less than optimal standing. A firmware update should be enough to address this issue and eliminate any sort of performance regressions and actually improve it somewhat. Engineering a product which runs worse with better cooling - that's kind of an epic fail.
jjj - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
Unless it detects benchmarks and lets the controller clock higher for better scores.If VW can do it , the possibility needs to be investigated elsewhere too.nathanddrews - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
You know what this means, right? Next test: custom water blocks.FunBunny2 - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
^^that's funny
Breit - Saturday, December 26, 2015 - link
You mean something EKWB did for the Intel 750?http://www.ekwb.com/news/638/19/EK-is-releasing-In...
:D
meacupla - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
I think this is where all those low profile, frag tape backed, RAM heatsinks, that came along with aftermarket GPU coolers, will come in handy.ironwing - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
I wonder how much heat 25 LEDs add to a heat sink?mostlyharmless - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
Yeah, and aren't the fins supposed to be external instead of internal?Billy Tallis - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
They're really more like ducts than fins as designed. What air does manage to enter the heatsink will not all flow across the entire drive. Some of the fresh cool air will bypass part of the drive, and some of it will just be cooling the heatsink itself. It looks like a design that would be very effective with a lot of airflow, but the intake is pretty small.Billy Tallis - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
The LEDs draw about 2W. Calculating how much of that gets converted to light that escapes the heatsink is left as an exercise for the reader.MrSpadge - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
10 - 20 mW each.r3loaded - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
So what we really need is the 950 Pro in a 2.5 inch drive and the U.2 interface. The bonus is drive capacities of 1TB and maybe even 2TB.Impulses - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
Great write-up Billy, I appreciate you running the full battery of tests again and re-addressing the Bench scores... A review of a heatsink feels somewhat incomplete without a single temperature measurement tho! SMART readings or something taken with a simple IR thermometer would've been helpful, specially to the kind of DIY'er that's likely to buy this. I'm curious if i can replicate comparable results with a simple stick on heatsink and some airflow, it's particularly relevant for those of us with multiple GPUs where the add in card might put the drive in just as bad of a spot but the M.2 slot might be exposed to more airflow.Billy Tallis - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
Unfortunately, the only high-quality thermometer I have is the temperature probe for the multimeter that was busy doing the power measurements. I'll be getting some kind of thermometer soon, and I'm open to suggestions of something with data logging capability. Otherwise I'll get a cheap IR thermometer and you'll have to be satisfied with just a few spot readings instead of the full graph we'd both rather see.defaultluser - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
I wonder if you could compare the performance of this heatsink versus just pointing a quiet 80mm fan at the drive? More moving air can have the same effect as much larger surface area, especially if we're only talking about half a watt extra required to reach full performance.ronboberg - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
So, basically they just need an extension cable/riser for the M.2 slot (they can do it for normal pci-e slot, these are basically the same thing but smaller) so you can relocate the drive in a normal drive bay to keep it cooled off. Or if they started out with something like a real cable going to a slightly modified M.2 connector that would be purposed for just drives on the board in the first place they could make normal 2.5" size drives with the new connector, 2TB+, and all the advantages that goes with being bigger and able to be placed like a normal drive. If you don't have the space, the small boards could still have the universal M.2 slot they have now for the bubblegum stick size drives but would just have to put up with the heat.extide - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
We already have what you are asking for: U.2tipoo - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
I wonder how this compares to just slapping these on the relevant chipshttp://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
Zak - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
As few posters mentioned already: there is no room for even the tiniest heatsink.MrSpadge - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
Of course there is enough space: the chip packages themselves. It won't work in a laptop, but for a desktop some simple small memory heatsinks should do the trick just as well. for 5$ (aluminum is sufficient instead of copper) instad of 75$. And never mind if the heat sink overlaps the chips a bit, just make sure it doesn't short anything on the mainboard (use some insulation tape as needed).tipoo - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
Final words page, should the with and without heatsinks be flipped? If it was thermally shackled, should the higher bar not be for the one *with* the heatsink and not without?http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph9856/79399...
tipoo - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
*for the 512GB drive at least, the 256 seems rightThe_Assimilator - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
I think you are correct, I also noticed it and had a "huh, WTF?" moment.Ryan Smith - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
That is actually correct. The drives are more consistent when they thermally throttle because the controller has plenty of time to catch up. Whereas with a heatsink they're running at full tilt, and sometimes the controller has trouble keeping things consistent.tipoo - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
Huh, interesting.tipoo - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
So why is the scenario the exact flip on the 256GB drive? Did it just finish the test sooner?Billy Tallis - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
During thermal throttling, the 256GB was occasionally stuttering and dropping from 6k IOPS to 2k IOPS. That tanked the consistency score. The 512GB's performance regulation when thermally throttled was basically perfect—during steady state it never deviated from ~6k IOPS.Magichands8 - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
I really don't get why so many people seem to love M.2 so much. Sure it's convenient for laptops but for just about anything else it's a severely limited form factor restricting capacity and adding heat issues while eating up precious expansion slot space on the motherboard. What I'd really like to see are U.2 SSDs with 10 times the capacity.nwarawa - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
The performance is obvious plateauing with that heatsink, so it begs the question: what is good enough? I assume it's just the controller that needs to be cooled. Would one of those tiny chipset heatsinks with some thermal tape still see most, if not all, the benefit of this Angelbird heatsink?Billy Tallis - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
Given sufficient airflow, I think one of those small heatsinks could get the job done. I don't think most M.2 slots or adapters put the drive in a position to receive that much airflow unless your case is already a serious wind tunnel.damianrobertjones - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
"The M.2 form factor has quickly established itself as the most popular choice for PCIe SSDs in the consumer space. "How do you know this? I'd still rather buy a 950 Pro 2.5" than an M.2. (I do own both though)
moozooh - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
"PCIe to M.2 adapter"Shouldn't it be "M.2 to PCIe adapter"? Since, you know, it adapts an M.2 device to a PCIe slot but not the opposite.
Billy Tallis - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
I was looking at it as making a PCIe slot into an M.2 slot into which you'd insert the drive, as opposed to thinking of it as something modifying the drive. I can see how a consumer pairing it with a particular drive would take the other perspective, but to me the adapter is the permanent part of the testbed and the drives are transient occupants.edzieba - Tuesday, December 22, 2015 - link
With most Skylake ITX boards having the m.2 slot on the back, it would be interesting to see how well a simple coupling of the drive to the motherboard backplate with an adhesive thermal pad compares to the bare drive (and/or to a dedicated PCIe slot heatsink like this). I suspect the relatively tiny power levels involved (barely over 5W at most) would mean a nice sheet of aluminium or steel would be more than enough heatsinking for even sustained heavy loads.zodiacfml - Tuesday, December 22, 2015 - link
Performance of these drives are awesome that I would never be able to throttle them even if I try. Regarding the form factor, I believe they have designed it really well. It might be too big in 5 to years from now.fvbounty - Tuesday, December 22, 2015 - link
Can you post some temps, I'm surprised you didn't have them in the review?kilgor270 - Friday, January 1, 2016 - link
Just installed my PX1 with a Samsung SM951 as my boot drive. The PX1 seems to be very well constructed in my opinion. Easy to put the SM951 chip in and then install into computer.The white LED's were a surprise. Since I'm not a gamer, to me the leds are just an indication that power is going to the board. I monitored the heat using a couple software apps and at first glance without stressing it, it is hovering around 90 degrees F. Performance r/w is right around 1450 MBs +/-Overall for a couple days testing, I am very very happy with this combination as a boot drive. Totally changed my overall system profile in a very positive way.
orencom - Thursday, January 7, 2016 - link
the real question is weather there are real use cases which utilize PCIe SSD bandwidth capabilities...Machou360 - Sunday, January 10, 2016 - link
Just bought two of these and in RAID0, they are a beast ! Made the same bentches and putting a raspberry heatsink on each of the M2 controller simply avoids any heat issue (had to remote part of the sticker for that, which was very easy) I would recommend these drives anytime, performance is superb!XmppTextingBloodsport - Saturday, March 19, 2016 - link
"Will thrashing air about be efficacious?""Should we really rely upon [haphazard] fans for cooling?"
jefflynn333 - Sunday, September 4, 2016 - link
I would like to see the Angelbird tested against just using small heat sinks attached to the 950. That seems like a logical alternative.