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pretty much every component of a modern system can be water cooled these days

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but there's one notable exception that

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almost no one seems to do

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the SSD which raises the question why don't we

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water cool ssds especially

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when it turns out that we actually do

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have the power meet

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the alpha cool mcx little tiny water

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cooling block that i will be using to not only liquid

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cool this mp600 SSD from Corsair but

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also determine whether we can get any

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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

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establish that our mp600 SSD here

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actually has a chance of benefiting from

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additional cooling i mean Corsair obviously thought so they went and put

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this gigantic heatsink on the thing but

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that doesn't mean necessarily that there's a performance benefit to it it

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could just be to help the thing last longer or to help it operate normally in

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situations where it doesn't have any airflow so in order to find out if it

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even suffers from thermal throttling in the first place we need one of these now

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this is a little bit on the overkill side we've got an epic 7742 64 core

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processor two terabytes of RAM gtx titan x all that good stuff we don't really

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need any of that what we need is a pci express gen 4 m.2 slot so we're going to

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be using the one down here at the bottom because this SSD is capable of

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blisteringly fast sequential read and write speeds but

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only as long as it's cooled properly so let's go ahead and get that installed to

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figure all of that out and stress our SSD to the max without venturing beyond

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the realm of the real world i'm gonna be using a fun little script that Anthony

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from our team created called the looping file copy test so you can see i'm

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actually moving a test file over so this is a 10 gig cineform 1080p video file

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and then i'm going to copy these five items i've got two folders ltx and ltx2

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output that's a text file that tells us what exactly our copy time was and this

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test batch file as well as the p time application

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and we're done so what it's going to do

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is when we run this test batch file

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it's going to take everything that's in the ltx folder and copy it over to ltx2

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then it's going to take everything in ltx2 copy it back to ltx1 oh wow that

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was not expected all right as i was saying before i was so rudely

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interrupted we've got four instances of our looping file copy test and what's

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going to happen is that once we run the batch file

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with our 10 gig file in there

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it is going to constantly copy the contents of ltx into ltx2 and when it's

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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

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nauseum throwing the results in output.txt so you can see

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it's completing these transactions in about four and a half to five seconds

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right now so if we experience thermal throttling we

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would expect those results to start to degrade over time or uh degrade this way

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go up is more worse than this before we do that let's start with a baseline

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crystal disk mark run here with the drive just in a not quite idle state

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because we just copied some files but basically dang these pci express gen 4

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drives are fast five gigabytes a second those are pretty great results anywhere

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from three to five gigabytes a second sequential reads and writes but that's

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without my background file copy tests running at the same time so i'm gonna

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launch four of those

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just like that also i have another fun trick

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i want to have a look at how hot this thing is running and i happen to have

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just the tool this thing is so cool i love it come on

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baby that's hot

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now that's hot now this is metal which can have

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emissivity issues but it's black and it's matte so i'm hoping

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that it's not going to be too bad and it looks like we are anywhere in the

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neighborhood of around 50 to 52 degrees on our heatsink here

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but this test is just getting started

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right now curiously we were well over 50 degrees and now we're just over 40

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but my test didn't finish not only that but

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it's got the option to run it again i think this just completely errored out

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so i don't think i'm going to have the option of running crystal disk mark

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while my batch files are running in the background which means

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i'm gonna have to rely on those text output files now our SSD is plugged into

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a zenith two Threadripper board and it's uh right here in between the pci

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express slots i installed i didn't really install it i just kind of chucked

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it on there a pci express card to simulate what it's like for it to not

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have any direct airflow and we have the stress test running so you

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can see we are actually we've got almost five gigabytes a second of disk activity

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happening here at a queue depth of about five and our drive is reporting in

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hardware info about 68 degrees but i

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don't think that's right because check this out ladies and gentlemen

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75 degrees max here

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running this test it's awful it's a travesty one small fly

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in my ointment however is that even after all of this time it's

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been running for uh about 40 minutes now

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i haven't noticed any difference in the execution time of this

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file copy so it doesn't seem to be throttling yep

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still consistent all of them are consistent so you might be thinking to

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yourself g Linus Corsair made a pretty

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well-designed cooler for their SSD i guess that screws over your whole video

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concept doesn't it to which i would reply no in fact it doesn't because

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there are more reasons to water cool than just preventing your stuff from

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thermal throttling maybe you just want it to last longer everyone knows that

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integrated circuits will last for a longer period of time the cooler that

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you can keep them operating during their lifetime so we're going to proceed with

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our little frankenstein cooling experiment anyway starting by

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removing the existing heatsink and backplate kenai among you might have

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noticed that lack of thermal interface material between the back plate and

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these nand flash chips the reason for that is that not every component of an

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SSD needs to be cooled equally so the

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controller right here that follows the normal laws of cooler temperatures being

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basically better at least until you get to like you know deep in the subzeros

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nand flash on the other hand is actually rated by j deck at 40

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degrees centigrade and apparently if it goes down to about room temperature

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about 25 degrees and you write to it its right endurance can be as little as half

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of what it is at its rated 40 degree temperature so they are supposed to run

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a little bit warm so if i were to just take a water cooler and slap it on this

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thing i could actually cool certain components of it

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too much so we're going to start by just putting a water block onto the controller wow am

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i good or what freaking nailed it

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a little wipe down with alcohol ensures that our thermal adhesive will stick better that's really important because

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once we've got tubes hanging off this thing and all that's holding it on is

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some double-sided thermal tape we want it to stick as well as it possibly can

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oh wow that didn't stick at all

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uh-oh well that's actually on there pretty good but just for safety i'm gonna throw

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a zip tie on here you know you like it

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come on i've seen worse mounting mechanisms but just because we can't

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water cool the flash chips doesn't mean they shouldn't have any cooling whatsoever so we're going to go ahead

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and put on something kind of you know

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similar to what Corsair had before we're going to put

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some heat sinks on them on the one side so hopefully they should soak up some of

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the heat not just from the chip on this side but also the one on the other i

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still remember making these little heat sinks back when i was a young enthusiast

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and aliexpress you know with something like this for three bucks

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didn't exist i just i i cut up some chipset heat sinks off of a dead

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board or something like that and then sanded down the bottoms of them so they

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were nice and smooth that is our custom water cooled SSD

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let's get this thing installed before i can actually test the drive though i

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need to solve a small problem we're using this teeny tiny little i think

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this is like 1 16 inch tubing

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to run to this teeny tiny water block problem is

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all the standard g1 quarter fittings we have lying around in the pc workshop

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here are like quarter inch or 3 8 at the

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smallest so clearly that's not gonna work

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fortunately we have

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many different tubings and

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a handful of adapters adapter number one

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takes us from three-eighths inch on our normal water cooling equipment down to

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quarter inch adapter number two takes us from quarter inch down to

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little tiny i think this is 1 8 inch it might be

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even smaller there we go

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not bad right not bad at all so all that's left now is

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to find out if it works we're just gonna fill up our water

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cooling loop lttstore.com and fire this bad boy up

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hey there it is all right

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why don't we just like create a copy here make sure it's set yep

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got a couple gigabytes a second of file copy transfer nonsense let's fire up

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hardware info and see what our temps are like

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oh dang we down at 29 degrees now boys and girls

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now our thermal camera results are not going to be comparable to what we had

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before because uh the block in particular is quite shiny it's quite

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reflective so we can't trust the readings off of it but we at least know

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that our pcb is running at a chilly 26 and 26 high 27 low degrees

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that's pretty darn good now let's hit it with a stress test shall we

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everything's working as expected with our four tests running we're in the neighborhood of four gigabytes four plus

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gigabytes per second now let's fire up hardware info where

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we're sitting at a chilly 40 degrees on wherever the heck that

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sensor is we're starting to see a few hotspots so we can see our nand flash is

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heating up that's right about where we want it though

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right in that 40 degree sort of range so it's been running for an hour um there's

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a bit of an anomaly in the data right here where it took a hundred seconds to

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copy one way and then the other i think that's when the

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computer went to sleep because apparently i forgot to disable that but

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other than that we've got some pretty good looking results where

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no our drive does not in fact throttle

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and it's running at full speed even now after an hour of operation and perhaps

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more importantly check this out we're getting like

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five gigabytes a second of disk io there

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it is 5.8 it's crazy perhaps more importantly

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though it is running at a mere 50 degrees according to hardware info and

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when we whip out our thermal camera pretty much everything about this

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is optimal so we can check that pcb temperature

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right between our nand flash that's around 50 degrees

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perfect so we're not over cooling the flash chips

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then we get right in here kind of around the

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uh there we go around the soc you know what in the 40s something along

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those lines that's looking pretty chill and actually it turns out our dram

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doesn't heat up very much at all in this kind of a use case where we're just

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sequentially copying to and from the drive i mean can we declare victory at

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this point brennan yeah i mean you can't install anything in the

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slot next to it unless you kind of wouldn't be able to install anything

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there it's kind of jank these might fall off if you actually okay it has issues

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but it runs cooler it runs fast and we did the whole thing for just a

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few bucks that little little tiny water block it's

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like seven dollars

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kinds of janky water cooling projects you might enjoy the one where we water

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cooled a laptop with steve from gamersnexus actually subzero alcohol

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cooled a laptop but you know who's keeping track we'll get that video

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linked down below for you