SSD M2/mSATA heatsinks, are they worth it?

Hello, I am now down to 3 machines, Lenovo W530, ASUA ROG GL702LV and Toughbook CF-19Mk6.

The toughbook just has a single SSD in 2.5" format so I'll skip to W530 and GL702.

W530 has mSATA Kingston 1TB SSD and GL702 has 2TB M2 WD Blue SSD. Both of them also have 2.5" WD Blue HDD and W530 has a WD Red 2TB 2.5" SSD also. At any or all times, the boot drive mSATA/M2 SSDs are running hotter than other drives.

Few years ago I was toying with the idea of installing heatsinks on the Lenovo T430's mSATA SSD but the heatsink ended up touching the bottom door and I ended up not installing it.

Now looking at the boot drives running at ~40C almost all of the time, I want to drop their temperature to at least 5C below now.

For W530, I can see the airflow through the mSATA socket, and same for GL702 and if I order a low profile copper heatsink, they "should" install without too much problem.

Now question is since I never actually did install and test how effective they are over time. I want to ask those who have, was it worth it?

 

I've considered it for both laptop / desktop and haven't implemented them. ~40C is about ambient temp in most cases. Unless you're introducing additional cooling to your environment it's not going to drop the temps all that much. It might make more of a difference when the machines are under load over 50C. Making sure your fans and air ports are clean makes a difference.

 

I mean the boot drive even under heavy load stays below 50C but also idles at ~40C. I just found a very good reason why I shouldn't get the heatsinks, I have to remove the warranty labels.... These are new drives

 

That's a very good reason unless you have a piggy bank to replace them before the warranty is up. Considering most these days come with a 5 year period it's a good idea to just live with it or if you can make contact with the chassis using the silicon pads to help dissipate the heat that might be an option.

 

Well... For GL702, bottom panel is plastic and W530, closest contact is the keyboard.

I guess I'll live with it haha.

Off topic a bit, My work desktop with two EVO M2's, they have been on for 3+ years continuously and still going strong.

 

Yeah, they're pretty durable if you have airflow. I've been running dual in my laptop 24/7 and they're fine. Idle temps are ~30c but they get toasty on copies.

 

for the 2.5" ones, i had an adata su800 in my toughbook regularly at 70C with for 40000hours on with several failures

 

If they were built as part of the case that's different but adding heatsinks as other mention unless your environment is sealed environment that might be where one keeps their vents and cpu fans clean first this is where the heats buildup starts. You be surprised at just dust bunny cleaning can change a CPU fan - I know I did that to one of my nephew gaming laptop and before when running you can hear the fan startup but once cleaned and repasted the change was immediately noticed. Fan noise was only when the laptop was running a game but no game it went quiet.

 

not worth it at 40-50C. also, flash chips actually dont like to be running "too cold", that actually reduces their lifespan SSD heatsinks only really make sense when u notice throttling behaviour under heavy workloads, i.e. with high end m.2 nvme drives that can potentially reach 80+ C on their controllers.