holy smokes that's hot this thing's running at
105 degrees that can't be right
ow dang it that cannot be good for it ssds are supposed to have three major
benefits over mechanical hard drives performance longevity and of course
efficiency so how is it that we've come to this
a water-cooled SSD only the next
15 minutes can tell us the answer and it's brought to you by ifixit do you
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i guess step one is to open this thing up and see what the heck is going on
here you know what's funny is the thing is we actually did water cool and SSD
coincidentally one of corsairs about a year ago with fascinating results what's
most fascinating about those results is that Corsair presumably watched that
video and then came out with this this is the mp600 pro not only does it
feature water cooling but it can actually be plumbed into your custom
liquid cooling loop meaning that this thing should be the coolest SSD on the market
there we go thermal pad nice copper block you won't get any corrosion from
adding aluminum parts to your loop no actual fins or anything on the inside
surface of the block i can i can see in there uh you've got a faison e18
controller it's a nice high-end controller pci express gen4 you've got
presumably what about two gigs probably
of ddr3 memory and then two terabytes of 3d
tlc nan that's rated for
3600 terabytes written so very high-end
SSD here's a funny thing the heat spreader that goes on the bottom side of
the drive okay so it's got thermal pad there too for the RAM chip and then four
yep four nand packages that are back there that one doesn't actually connect
to the water cooling thermally in any way but there could be a good
engineering reason for that you see there's conflicting evidence out there
as to whether or not cooling the nand flash is actually beneficial the old
wisdom back when we made our original video was actually that cooling it could
make it not last as long but then there's new research that seems to
indicate that going too hot could increase errors and basically just the
cooler the better may be true like with pretty much any other integrated
circuits of course though even if cooling the nand is good the hottest
component on this device is absolutely this controller and that's the one that
if it goes too hot is going to affect our performance so that's what the water
blocks attach to let's go ahead and reattach it shall we now this is a
little awkward in order to install our water cooled SSD we actually have to
remove this chunky heat sink with sexy RGB on
it and this thermal pad and put them
here so that we can have this here oh crap i
put the water block on upside down up till this point in the video we may have
actually been very unfair to Corsair something neither you nor i considered
is that on most motherboards the highest performance m.2 slot is actually
extremely close to the CPU socket because it has to be connected directly
to CPU PCIe lanes what that means is
that it also happens to be directly behind the super hot backplate of your
graphics card this thing might need water cooling more than we thought no
well no you know what let's give it one one fan let's give it a try let's give
it a try so we're gonna run a control okay with just the SSD with just the
heatsink on it and see if it slows down under a stress test ready
go it's going now hey there it goes all
right we got total activity a hundred percent on our
drive he's ramping up boys wait holy
it balls we have a core i9 11 900 k
pegged at 90 percent usage just
sharding data onto and then reading it off of this drive
oh yeah the test that i made up slams it
this is not what we expected to happen you can see this red line here is from
yesterday the drive went whoa it's so hot in here and thermal
throttled and today thanks to our
magnificently you're welcome air conditioned
warehouse workspace the drive did not actually reach the 70
degree thermal throttling point making it only to
68. that's not nice remember how i mentioned before that one of the
challenges for an SSD sitting right there between the CPU and GPU is that
when you're gaming or doing anything else intensive it could heat up even
more than it otherwise would well we're just gonna run fur mark and we're gonna
try this again good luck everyone something to note is our curve might
look a little bit different this time because we didn't let it cool all the
way down because we're trying to thermal throttling that's the whole point
well that's just great we peaked at 79 degrees and definitely thermal throttled
but with thermal throttle like to hell and
back we went from almost two gigabytes a second to one Gigabyte a second reads
that's good hypothesis proved that GPU
being nearby is bad and it can thermal throttle all right
well let's add water cooling of course depending who you ask there's a lot of
different ways that you can water cool a product remember back when i got that
water-cooled kit of memory that just had water in it but it wasn't actually
circulating well i have a theory that we could actually
get away with doing something similar here just filling the SSD
with water and then sealing it up in a nutshell what we're doing by throwing
water in here is we're adding kind of thermal inertia we're making it so that when the
drive is under heavy load let's say we're editing 12k video or something
like that it takes a lot of thermal energy for that water to actually change
its own temperature because water's awesome thank you water you're amazing
then what will happen is we will stop doing what we're doing and it will be
able to dissipate that heat so it's really great for absorbing bursty loads
but maybe not as good for long sustained ones now if there weren't thermal
protections built into this product i would never recommend doing something
like this because the drive cannot exceed 70 degrees
it's probably fine but if you had something that could get to boiling temperature
you could create a lot of pressure in there and like blow a gasket and water everywhere now
actually seems like a really good time to explain the test that we're using to
thermal throttle our SSD we're using a tool called iometer which was developed
by Intel back in the 90s and then open sourced in the 2000s
it's not particularly user friendly but what
it is is extremely customizable so the
way we've got it configured here is we've set our maximum disk size to 40
million sectors which means basically we're
working with a 20 Gigabyte file it's important that this is more than the
amount of system memory we have then in terms of our access specifications we're
hitting it with four kibi-byte accesses which is not quite the same as a
kilobyte but don't worry about it and they are 50 reads 50 rights and it's all
sequential so we are just slamming this thing one other really important thing
we had to do is change the results display update frequency to two seconds
otherwise this drive is so fast that it would actually just
throttle at the CPU level if we tried to
update more often than that so fascinating results the red is without
water cooling and the green is well filling up
our block with water so as expected the
green one takes quite a bit longer to reach that 80 degree thermal throttle
point but then what we didn't expect is that it doesn't throttle all the way
back to 70 degrees and doesn't tank the performance to nearly the same degree
although the performance gets extremely inconsistent so this is the actual drive
right performance isn't that fascinating all right let's
do it properly now oh ah hot oh wow
that's hot water oh man this is just it feels wrong you
know here we go water cooled SSD ladies and
gentlemen we mocked it at the start of this video but it could be necessary nay
essential for your gaming enjoyment what the heck is this
going on it's having a little i've never seen that having a little freak out here
no i know what it is there's no freaking restriction in the loop
that block is basically just a u-turn like it's not there's no micro fins or
anything like that you could get really high flow rates through a single
component loop but these days everything cpus gpus they've got these like
impingement jet things these little micro fins that are hard for the water
to get through so you never see stuff like this anymore i hadn't i hadn't seen
anything go like this in years well that's great for cooling it means our
flow rate is going to be terrific check this out our drive is at 19 degrees
19 degrees ladies and gentlemen 60 minutes sure okay
what do you think is it gonna throttle there it goes
it went up by a degree two degrees
we're back and this is amazing we managed to reach
a maximum of 29 degrees over the course of a full
hour long test and our performance
basically still got some of that inconsistency although that's probably
more down to drive garbage collection and
like nand write speed limits more than anything else but it did stay higher
than any of our other tests so in conclusion water cooling your SSD
is completely unnecessary and we've even
done the math to prove it the thing is
under normal circumstances it is conceivable that your CPU or your
graphics card could be 100 loaded for
extended periods of time whether you're gaming or running some kind of render or
simulation so when we test those components
that's why we hit them so hard to ensure that they won't thermal throttle under
those conditions but with an SSD
you normally only hit it with very short bursty loads at a time and when i say
normally i mean almost always outside of industrial or
server applications so get this
at the speed of this drive which it's writing at about two gigabytes a second
this entire time it would manage to write over the course of an hour
actually you can see it hardware info has done the math for us it has written
a total of 22.8 gigabytes just running this benchmark to
put that in perspective because of the performance of this drive at its 1400
terabytes rated right endurance it would actually burn itself out in a span of
somewhere between three and four days
now obviously Corsair doesn't expect anyone to actually use the drive like
this because they estimate it would take about 280 years to fully utilize the
right endurance of this drive because they think you'd probably do about 32
gigabytes a day i would say their estimate is actually probably on the
high side in terms of how much you'd write a day so this thing should last
for a really freaking long time unless of course you are stupid enough to run
benchmarks like this that could actually cause it to thermal throttle because
then check this out we managed to use
two percent of our drive endurance just
sitting here benchmarking it to make this video so is water cooling good for
your SSD maybe but only if you were going to kill it in
some other way the one saving grace for this product is that the price of the
mp600 pro air cooled version is 450 some
odd dollars and the price for the water cooled version is actually
469 dollars so
at least it's not really costing you any extra assuming that you already had a
water cooled system and it certainly does run cooler especially in that slot
that's got all these heat generating components around it that is a very
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
cooled an SSD but we did it our way
the jank way this is actually like kind of kind of pro i think it's pretty good
i'm kind of i'm kind of sold if it's only like a 15 adder you do have to buy
fittings too though