SilverStone TP02-M2: An Aluminum Heatsink For Cooling An M.2 SSD

Onto some testing with these M.2 SSD heatsinks...

First up were some tests of the SilverStone TP02-M2 on a Samsung 950 PRO 256GB drive in a Core i7 8700K test system.

When running the timed GCC compiler benchmark test, which uses moderate I/O activity but obviously not as intense as synthetic disk benchmarks, the Samsung 950 PRO with TP02-M2 was about two degrees cooler than without any heatsink.

But when running FIO we can quickly see where under heavy I/O workloads how the TP02-M2 can make quite a difference on the NVMe drive temperature. While starting out at the same temperature, the Samsung 950 PRO alone rose to a 59 degree temperature with FIO while at the end of the benchmark when cooled by this SilverStone SSD cooling kit, its temperature was only 50 degrees.

In other I/O workloads run by FIO, there was a similar impact... With random writes, the TP02-M2 led to the average drive temperature dropping by 8 degrees while the peak difference was 10 degrees.

Not bad for a little piece of aluminum and a thermal pad. With the benchmarks themselves the I/O performance was the same with not hitting any thermal throttling.