We love SSDs for so many reasons: they’re silent, they move data so much faster than hard drives it’s orgasmic at times, they’re tiny and easy to tuck out of the way, they’re affordable in reasonable capacities, and they don’t get very hot, or at least current models don’t. Though all these traits will remain true for the foreseeable future, that last one might become a “legacy feature” soon with the arrival of power-hungry PCIe 5.0 SSDs. As CES 2022 draws near, manufacturers have begun announcing radical cooling products for SSDs that were seen as something as a novelty in the past, but may become more prominent as drive performance rapidly escalates.
As a refresher, PCIe 5.0 is due to hit the scene in Q1 of 2022 and it’s more than just a modest bump in spec compared to PCIe 4.0. As in the past, maximum theoretical performance is expected to double. So instead of 7Gb/s read and write speeds, the next-gen standard goes all the way to 11 14GB/s for an x4 connection, making it a huge performance leap and an instant upgrade choice for a lot of hardcore PC users.
The only problem is that upgrade might not be as easy as you think it’s going to be. Companies have already begun announcing active cooling solutions for these barn-burner drives (that is, coolers with spinning fans attached to them). This is a bit of an upgrade to the heatsinks a lot of companies have been using on their drives previously, which are typically passive and have no fans. The heatsink absorbs the heat from the drive and radiates it away via airflow inside the chassis in an effort to prevent the drives from throttling under heavy workloads.
Read more > https://www.extremetech.com/computing/330080-active-cooling-solutions-emerge-for-upcoming-pcie-5-0-s...
