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holy smokes that's hot this thing's running at

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105 degrees that can't be right

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ow dang it that cannot be good for it ssds are supposed to have three major

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benefits over mechanical hard drives performance longevity and of course

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efficiency so how is it that we've come to this

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a water-cooled SSD only the next

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15 minutes can tell us the answer and it's brought to you by ifixit do you

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like repairing your own electronics instead of spending hundreds on expensive replacement or repair services

9
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use ifixit and learn more about ifixit's essential electronics tool kit at the

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link below or at the end of this video

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i guess step one is to open this thing up and see what the heck is going on

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here you know what's funny is the thing is we actually did water cool and SSD

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coincidentally one of corsairs about a year ago with fascinating results what's

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most fascinating about those results is that Corsair presumably watched that

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video and then came out with this this is the mp600 pro not only does it

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feature water cooling but it can actually be plumbed into your custom

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liquid cooling loop meaning that this thing should be the coolest SSD on the market

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there we go thermal pad nice copper block you won't get any corrosion from

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adding aluminum parts to your loop no actual fins or anything on the inside

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surface of the block i can i can see in there uh you've got a faison e18

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controller it's a nice high-end controller pci express gen4 you've got

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presumably what about two gigs probably

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of ddr3 memory and then two terabytes of 3d

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tlc nan that's rated for

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3600 terabytes written so very high-end

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SSD here's a funny thing the heat spreader that goes on the bottom side of

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the drive okay so it's got thermal pad there too for the RAM chip and then four

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yep four nand packages that are back there that one doesn't actually connect

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to the water cooling thermally in any way but there could be a good

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engineering reason for that you see there's conflicting evidence out there

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as to whether or not cooling the nand flash is actually beneficial the old

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wisdom back when we made our original video was actually that cooling it could

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make it not last as long but then there's new research that seems to

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indicate that going too hot could increase errors and basically just the

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cooler the better may be true like with pretty much any other integrated

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circuits of course though even if cooling the nand is good the hottest

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component on this device is absolutely this controller and that's the one that

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if it goes too hot is going to affect our performance so that's what the water

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blocks attach to let's go ahead and reattach it shall we now this is a

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little awkward in order to install our water cooled SSD we actually have to

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remove this chunky heat sink with sexy RGB on

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it and this thermal pad and put them

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here so that we can have this here oh crap i

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put the water block on upside down up till this point in the video we may have

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actually been very unfair to Corsair something neither you nor i considered

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is that on most motherboards the highest performance m.2 slot is actually

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extremely close to the CPU socket because it has to be connected directly

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to CPU PCIe lanes what that means is

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that it also happens to be directly behind the super hot backplate of your

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graphics card this thing might need water cooling more than we thought no

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well no you know what let's give it one one fan let's give it a try let's give

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it a try so we're gonna run a control okay with just the SSD with just the

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heatsink on it and see if it slows down under a stress test ready

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go it's going now hey there it goes all

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right we got total activity a hundred percent on our

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drive he's ramping up boys wait holy

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it balls we have a core i9 11 900 k

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pegged at 90 percent usage just

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sharding data onto and then reading it off of this drive

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oh yeah the test that i made up slams it

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this is not what we expected to happen you can see this red line here is from

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yesterday the drive went whoa it's so hot in here and thermal

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throttled and today thanks to our

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magnificently you're welcome air conditioned

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warehouse workspace the drive did not actually reach the 70

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degree thermal throttling point making it only to

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68. that's not nice remember how i mentioned before that one of the

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challenges for an SSD sitting right there between the CPU and GPU is that

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when you're gaming or doing anything else intensive it could heat up even

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more than it otherwise would well we're just gonna run fur mark and we're gonna

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try this again good luck everyone something to note is our curve might

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look a little bit different this time because we didn't let it cool all the

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way down because we're trying to thermal throttling that's the whole point

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well that's just great we peaked at 79 degrees and definitely thermal throttled

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but with thermal throttle like to hell and

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back we went from almost two gigabytes a second to one Gigabyte a second reads

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that's good hypothesis proved that GPU

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being nearby is bad and it can thermal throttle all right

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well let's add water cooling of course depending who you ask there's a lot of

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different ways that you can water cool a product remember back when i got that

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water-cooled kit of memory that just had water in it but it wasn't actually

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circulating well i have a theory that we could actually

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get away with doing something similar here just filling the SSD

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with water and then sealing it up in a nutshell what we're doing by throwing

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water in here is we're adding kind of thermal inertia we're making it so that when the

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drive is under heavy load let's say we're editing 12k video or something

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like that it takes a lot of thermal energy for that water to actually change

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its own temperature because water's awesome thank you water you're amazing

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then what will happen is we will stop doing what we're doing and it will be

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able to dissipate that heat so it's really great for absorbing bursty loads

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but maybe not as good for long sustained ones now if there weren't thermal

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protections built into this product i would never recommend doing something

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like this because the drive cannot exceed 70 degrees

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it's probably fine but if you had something that could get to boiling temperature

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you could create a lot of pressure in there and like blow a gasket and water everywhere now

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actually seems like a really good time to explain the test that we're using to

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thermal throttle our SSD we're using a tool called iometer which was developed

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by Intel back in the 90s and then open sourced in the 2000s

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it's not particularly user friendly but what

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it is is extremely customizable so the

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way we've got it configured here is we've set our maximum disk size to 40

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million sectors which means basically we're

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working with a 20 Gigabyte file it's important that this is more than the

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amount of system memory we have then in terms of our access specifications we're

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hitting it with four kibi-byte accesses which is not quite the same as a

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kilobyte but don't worry about it and they are 50 reads 50 rights and it's all

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sequential so we are just slamming this thing one other really important thing

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we had to do is change the results display update frequency to two seconds

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otherwise this drive is so fast that it would actually just

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throttle at the CPU level if we tried to

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update more often than that so fascinating results the red is without

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water cooling and the green is well filling up

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our block with water so as expected the

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green one takes quite a bit longer to reach that 80 degree thermal throttle

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point but then what we didn't expect is that it doesn't throttle all the way

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back to 70 degrees and doesn't tank the performance to nearly the same degree

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although the performance gets extremely inconsistent so this is the actual drive

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right performance isn't that fascinating all right let's

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do it properly now oh ah hot oh wow

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that's hot water oh man this is just it feels wrong you

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know here we go water cooled SSD ladies and

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gentlemen we mocked it at the start of this video but it could be necessary nay

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essential for your gaming enjoyment what the heck is this

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going on it's having a little i've never seen that having a little freak out here

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no i know what it is there's no freaking restriction in the loop

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that block is basically just a u-turn like it's not there's no micro fins or

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anything like that you could get really high flow rates through a single

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component loop but these days everything cpus gpus they've got these like

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impingement jet things these little micro fins that are hard for the water

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to get through so you never see stuff like this anymore i hadn't i hadn't seen

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anything go like this in years well that's great for cooling it means our

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flow rate is going to be terrific check this out our drive is at 19 degrees

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19 degrees ladies and gentlemen 60 minutes sure okay

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what do you think is it gonna throttle there it goes

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it went up by a degree two degrees

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we're back and this is amazing we managed to reach

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a maximum of 29 degrees over the course of a full

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hour long test and our performance

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basically still got some of that inconsistency although that's probably

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more down to drive garbage collection and

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like nand write speed limits more than anything else but it did stay higher

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than any of our other tests so in conclusion water cooling your SSD

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is completely unnecessary and we've even

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done the math to prove it the thing is

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under normal circumstances it is conceivable that your CPU or your

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graphics card could be 100 loaded for

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extended periods of time whether you're gaming or running some kind of render or

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simulation so when we test those components

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that's why we hit them so hard to ensure that they won't thermal throttle under

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those conditions but with an SSD

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you normally only hit it with very short bursty loads at a time and when i say

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normally i mean almost always outside of industrial or

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server applications so get this

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at the speed of this drive which it's writing at about two gigabytes a second

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this entire time it would manage to write over the course of an hour

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actually you can see it hardware info has done the math for us it has written

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a total of 22.8 gigabytes just running this benchmark to

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put that in perspective because of the performance of this drive at its 1400

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terabytes rated right endurance it would actually burn itself out in a span of

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somewhere between three and four days

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now obviously Corsair doesn't expect anyone to actually use the drive like

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this because they estimate it would take about 280 years to fully utilize the

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right endurance of this drive because they think you'd probably do about 32

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gigabytes a day i would say their estimate is actually probably on the

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high side in terms of how much you'd write a day so this thing should last

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for a really freaking long time unless of course you are stupid enough to run

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benchmarks like this that could actually cause it to thermal throttle because

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then check this out we managed to use

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two percent of our drive endurance just

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sitting here benchmarking it to make this video so is water cooling good for

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your SSD maybe but only if you were going to kill it in

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some other way the one saving grace for this product is that the price of the

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mp600 pro air cooled version is 450 some

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odd dollars and the price for the water cooled version is actually

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469 dollars so

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at least it's not really costing you any extra assuming that you already had a

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water cooled system and it certainly does run cooler especially in that slot

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that's got all these heat generating components around it that is a very

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mangled conclusion almost as mangled as the segway to our

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LTT if you guys enjoyed this video maybe go check out the one where we water

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cooled an SSD but we did it our way

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the jank way this is actually like kind of kind of pro i think it's pretty good

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i'm kind of i'm kind of sold if it's only like a 15 adder you do have to buy

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fittings too though