pretty much every component of a modern system can be water cooled these days
but there's one notable exception that
almost no one seems to do
the SSD which raises the question why don't we
water cool ssds especially
when it turns out that we actually do
have the power meet
the alpha cool mcx little tiny water
cooling block that i will be using to not only liquid
cool this mp600 SSD from Corsair but
also determine whether we can get any
performance benefit out of it and this video is brought to you by glasswire
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before we get started with any adorable water cooling though we need to
establish that our mp600 SSD here
actually has a chance of benefiting from
additional cooling i mean Corsair obviously thought so they went and put
this gigantic heatsink on the thing but
that doesn't mean necessarily that there's a performance benefit to it it
could just be to help the thing last longer or to help it operate normally in
situations where it doesn't have any airflow so in order to find out if it
even suffers from thermal throttling in the first place we need one of these now
this is a little bit on the overkill side we've got an epic 7742 64 core
processor two terabytes of RAM gtx titan x all that good stuff we don't really
need any of that what we need is a pci express gen 4 m.2 slot so we're going to
be using the one down here at the bottom because this SSD is capable of
blisteringly fast sequential read and write speeds but
only as long as it's cooled properly so let's go ahead and get that installed to
figure all of that out and stress our SSD to the max without venturing beyond
the realm of the real world i'm gonna be using a fun little script that Anthony
from our team created called the looping file copy test so you can see i'm
actually moving a test file over so this is a 10 gig cineform 1080p video file
and then i'm going to copy these five items i've got two folders ltx and ltx2
output that's a text file that tells us what exactly our copy time was and this
test batch file as well as the p time application
and we're done so what it's going to do
is when we run this test batch file
it's going to take everything that's in the ltx folder and copy it over to ltx2
then it's going to take everything in ltx2 copy it back to ltx1 oh wow that
was not expected all right as i was saying before i was so rudely
interrupted we've got four instances of our looping file copy test and what's
going to happen is that once we run the batch file
with our 10 gig file in there
it is going to constantly copy the contents of ltx into ltx2 and when it's
done doing that it's going to copy it back and then it's going to copy over that copy over that and keep going ad
nauseum throwing the results in output.txt so you can see
it's completing these transactions in about four and a half to five seconds
right now so if we experience thermal throttling we
would expect those results to start to degrade over time or uh degrade this way
go up is more worse than this before we do that let's start with a baseline
crystal disk mark run here with the drive just in a not quite idle state
because we just copied some files but basically dang these pci express gen 4
drives are fast five gigabytes a second those are pretty great results anywhere
from three to five gigabytes a second sequential reads and writes but that's
without my background file copy tests running at the same time so i'm gonna
launch four of those
just like that also i have another fun trick
i want to have a look at how hot this thing is running and i happen to have
just the tool this thing is so cool i love it come on
baby that's hot
now that's hot now this is metal which can have
emissivity issues but it's black and it's matte so i'm hoping
that it's not going to be too bad and it looks like we are anywhere in the
neighborhood of around 50 to 52 degrees on our heatsink here
but this test is just getting started
right now curiously we were well over 50 degrees and now we're just over 40
but my test didn't finish not only that but
it's got the option to run it again i think this just completely errored out
so i don't think i'm going to have the option of running crystal disk mark
while my batch files are running in the background which means
i'm gonna have to rely on those text output files now our SSD is plugged into
a zenith two Threadripper board and it's uh right here in between the pci
express slots i installed i didn't really install it i just kind of chucked
it on there a pci express card to simulate what it's like for it to not
have any direct airflow and we have the stress test running so you
can see we are actually we've got almost five gigabytes a second of disk activity
happening here at a queue depth of about five and our drive is reporting in
hardware info about 68 degrees but i
don't think that's right because check this out ladies and gentlemen
75 degrees max here
running this test it's awful it's a travesty one small fly
in my ointment however is that even after all of this time it's
been running for uh about 40 minutes now
i haven't noticed any difference in the execution time of this
file copy so it doesn't seem to be throttling yep
still consistent all of them are consistent so you might be thinking to
yourself g Linus Corsair made a pretty
well-designed cooler for their SSD i guess that screws over your whole video
concept doesn't it to which i would reply no in fact it doesn't because
there are more reasons to water cool than just preventing your stuff from
thermal throttling maybe you just want it to last longer everyone knows that
integrated circuits will last for a longer period of time the cooler that
you can keep them operating during their lifetime so we're going to proceed with
our little frankenstein cooling experiment anyway starting by
removing the existing heatsink and backplate kenai among you might have
noticed that lack of thermal interface material between the back plate and
these nand flash chips the reason for that is that not every component of an
SSD needs to be cooled equally so the
controller right here that follows the normal laws of cooler temperatures being
basically better at least until you get to like you know deep in the subzeros
nand flash on the other hand is actually rated by j deck at 40
degrees centigrade and apparently if it goes down to about room temperature
about 25 degrees and you write to it its right endurance can be as little as half
of what it is at its rated 40 degree temperature so they are supposed to run
a little bit warm so if i were to just take a water cooler and slap it on this
thing i could actually cool certain components of it
too much so we're going to start by just putting a water block onto the controller wow am
i good or what freaking nailed it
a little wipe down with alcohol ensures that our thermal adhesive will stick better that's really important because
once we've got tubes hanging off this thing and all that's holding it on is
some double-sided thermal tape we want it to stick as well as it possibly can
oh wow that didn't stick at all
uh-oh well that's actually on there pretty good but just for safety i'm gonna throw
a zip tie on here you know you like it
come on i've seen worse mounting mechanisms but just because we can't
water cool the flash chips doesn't mean they shouldn't have any cooling whatsoever so we're going to go ahead
and put on something kind of you know
similar to what Corsair had before we're going to put
some heat sinks on them on the one side so hopefully they should soak up some of
the heat not just from the chip on this side but also the one on the other i
still remember making these little heat sinks back when i was a young enthusiast
and aliexpress you know with something like this for three bucks
didn't exist i just i i cut up some chipset heat sinks off of a dead
board or something like that and then sanded down the bottoms of them so they
were nice and smooth that is our custom water cooled SSD
let's get this thing installed before i can actually test the drive though i
need to solve a small problem we're using this teeny tiny little i think
this is like 1 16 inch tubing
to run to this teeny tiny water block problem is
all the standard g1 quarter fittings we have lying around in the pc workshop
here are like quarter inch or 3 8 at the
smallest so clearly that's not gonna work
fortunately we have
many different tubings and
a handful of adapters adapter number one
takes us from three-eighths inch on our normal water cooling equipment down to
quarter inch adapter number two takes us from quarter inch down to
little tiny i think this is 1 8 inch it might be
even smaller there we go
not bad right not bad at all so all that's left now is
to find out if it works we're just gonna fill up our water
cooling loop lttstore.com and fire this bad boy up
hey there it is all right
why don't we just like create a copy here make sure it's set yep
got a couple gigabytes a second of file copy transfer nonsense let's fire up
hardware info and see what our temps are like
oh dang we down at 29 degrees now boys and girls
now our thermal camera results are not going to be comparable to what we had
before because uh the block in particular is quite shiny it's quite
reflective so we can't trust the readings off of it but we at least know
that our pcb is running at a chilly 26 and 26 high 27 low degrees
that's pretty darn good now let's hit it with a stress test shall we
everything's working as expected with our four tests running we're in the neighborhood of four gigabytes four plus
gigabytes per second now let's fire up hardware info where
we're sitting at a chilly 40 degrees on wherever the heck that
sensor is we're starting to see a few hotspots so we can see our nand flash is
heating up that's right about where we want it though
right in that 40 degree sort of range so it's been running for an hour um there's
a bit of an anomaly in the data right here where it took a hundred seconds to
copy one way and then the other i think that's when the
computer went to sleep because apparently i forgot to disable that but
other than that we've got some pretty good looking results where
no our drive does not in fact throttle
and it's running at full speed even now after an hour of operation and perhaps
more importantly check this out we're getting like
five gigabytes a second of disk io there
it is 5.8 it's crazy perhaps more importantly
though it is running at a mere 50 degrees according to hardware info and
when we whip out our thermal camera pretty much everything about this
is optimal so we can check that pcb temperature
right between our nand flash that's around 50 degrees
perfect so we're not over cooling the flash chips
then we get right in here kind of around the
uh there we go around the soc you know what in the 40s something along
those lines that's looking pretty chill and actually it turns out our dram
doesn't heat up very much at all in this kind of a use case where we're just
sequentially copying to and from the drive i mean can we declare victory at
this point brennan yeah i mean you can't install anything in the
slot next to it unless you kind of wouldn't be able to install anything
there it's kind of jank these might fall off if you actually okay it has issues
but it runs cooler it runs fast and we did the whole thing for just a
few bucks that little little tiny water block it's
like seven dollars
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kinds of janky water cooling projects you might enjoy the one where we water
cooled a laptop with steve from gamersnexus actually subzero alcohol
cooled a laptop but you know who's keeping track we'll get that video
linked down below for you