M.2 SSDs have gotten so fast to the point that the extra performance warrants the need for decent cooling heatsinks. Chinese manufacturer, JiuShark, has come up with a nice little solution for SSDs that utilizes a design similar to tower-type CPU heatsink coolers.
Chinese Manufacturer Announces M.2 SSD Cooler With Tower-Type CPU Heatsink Design & Active Cooler
So far, we have seen motherboard and SSD makers come up with some solid heatsink solutions to cool high-end SSDs. These include aluminum & copper heatsink designs and some have even gone a step ahead by offering liquid-cooled solutions. But one manufacturer in China, JiuShark, readies a brand new heatsink that looks like a tower-type CPU cooler.
The M.2-Three, as it's being called, was announced a few days ago. The heatsink looks exactly like a mini tower-type heatsink. The heatsink itself incorporates 27 aluminum fins which feature a single 10mm Heatpipe (nickel-plated copper finish) that runs through them from the base CNC machined aluminum baseplate. This is a full-aluminum base plate that sits over the primary SSD and has thermal pads on both sides. The SSD heatsink further adds a support bracket on the bottom of the storage device in a fully enclosed form factor.
The M.2-Three SSD heatsink cooler is designed to support up to M.2 2280 form factors. It isn't just the heatsink that provides cooling but JiuShark has further complimented the product with a 60mm fan which is its own '6010' design and comes with 8 blades. The fan can provide up to 14CFM of air-flow at 3000 RPM while producing a static pressure of 1.33mm H2O and noise of 25.4 dBA. In terms of size, the whole thing measures 41.5x35.5x82mm and weighs 113 grams.
JiuShark also shares its own performance results with the M.2-Three SSD heatsink. A standard Samsung 980 PRO 500 GB drive was used for testing. The SSD can be seen running at 71C for the NAND and 92C for the Controller. With the heatsink installed in passive mode (no active cooling), the temperatures see a drop of 49C for the NAND and 57C for the controller. Finally, with active cooling, the temps drop further down to 40C for the NAND and 33C for the controller. That's up to a 50% drop in temperatures and even with active cooling, you can still get some really good temps around the 50C mark which is ideal for SSD operation without the unwanted noise.
The main issue with a solution like this is that it will interfere with a graphics card running in the top slot or the CPU cooler itself, depending on the position of the fan. So unless you really want your brand new SSD to run at sub-50C temps, there's no need to get a heatsink like this. It could work well in a server or workstation PC though. Also, with upcoming PCIe Gen 5 SSDs reportedly running really hot, such solutions or even beefier SSDs may become the norm.
