Неправильный радиатор может убить SSD: как избежать перегрева двухсторонних накопителей

SSD prices are higher than ever due to the ongoing NAND flash shortage, which makes both your existing NVMes and any future upgrades a serious investment. When you’re spending big money on a 4TB or 8TB drive, the last thing you want is heat quietly shortening its lifespan. You might assume that installing any kind of heatsink solves the problem, but in some cases, that false sense of security can create more problems than it fixes—and is exactly what leads to premature failure. Not all NVMes are made equal—and neither are the heatsinks Are you cooking your SSD? An extremely important NVMe specification that manufacturers rarely highlight on product pages is the PCB layout. To be more specific, I'm referring to whether the NAND flash memory chips that store your data are located only on the top side of the board (single-sided) or on both the top and bottom (double-sided). The majority of modern NVMe drives at 2TB or below are single-sided. From what I've seen in my research, 8TB consumer NVMe drives are always double-sided (though some use slimmer NAND packages than others), whereas 4TB can go either way. For instance, the Samsung 990 Pro 4TB is single-sided, whereas the WD_BLACK SN850X 4TB is double-sided. This largely comes down to flash density limits. High-density NAND packages typically top out at around 2TB per package, and once you factor in the large controller and one or two DRAM cache chips, stuffing everything onto one side of the PCB becomes an impossible challenge. The reason why this matters is that double-sided NVMes need to be cooled on both sides of the NVMe, not just the top side. Although the vast majority of heat output from an NVMe comes from the controller, which is almost exclusively placed at the top, the NAND chips can also get very hot—especially when you consider their placement, as they sit below the GPU or between the GPU and CPU, two of the main heat sources in your PC. You might have read somewhere that NAND flash likes to be a little warm for optimal performance, and that's true—but we're talking about temperatures around 40°C. NVMes can easily reach temperatures above 70°C during heavy workloads like large file transfers, and when the NAND chips get too hot, physical and chemical degradation accelerates rapidly. Worse still, your data can be corrupted and lost forever. That's not just me theorizing—Hyperstone, a fabless semiconductor company, explains this degradation in its blog post about misconceptions regarding NAND flash. By the way, in the case of laptops, most models don't even support double-sided NVMes. Even if you can fit one into the slot, I strongly advise against it, as nearly every laptop on the market provides heatsinks (or some other way to dissipate heat) only on the top. If your NVMe is double-sided, get a heatsink that can cool both sides Double-sided SSDs have unique thermal needs It's easy to get a false sense of security, thinking your NVMe is safe just because you've mounted the heatsink that came with your motherboard. While that's generally true for single-sided NVMes, the exact opposite happens with double-sided units—the heatsink acts as a massive heat sponge, radiating heat toward the trapped air between the underside of the NVMe and the motherboard. It's this kind of setup that can lead to a single flash chip failing on the NVMe, resulting in corrupted data, read/write errors, stability issues, performance degradation, and, eventually, a complete drive failure. The good news? All of these problems can be fixed with a $5 NVMe heatsink with a bottom bracket, allowing it to cool both sides of the drive by spreading the heat evenly and transferring it to the top part of the heatsink. Some drives with a bottom bracket include the ID-COOLING ZERO M05, which is around $5 on AliExpress, the ARCTIC M2 Pro, which is currently on sale on Amazon for $5, and, if you want something truly substantial (substantially large, that is), the Thermalright HR-09. Arctic M2 Pro - Compatible Devices - M.2 2280 NVMe SSD The Arctic M2 Pro is an SSD heatsink/cooler that works with M.2 2280 NVMe SSDs. It lets the SSD perform even under heavy load. If you're not sure whether your NVMe is single- or double-sided, you don’t have to take it out of your system to check. Simply look it up online and consult third-party websites, reviews, and forum posts. Make sure to pay attention to the capacity as well—smaller variants of the same model can be single-sided, whereas higher-capacity models are usually double-sided. Please, don't forget about the thermal pads This isn't an excuse to go padless While most NVMe heatsinks with bottom brackets include pre-installed thermal pads, some models skip them. Without the thermal pads to act as thermal interface material (TIM), that bottom bracket can do more harm than good by trapping all the hot air underneath your NVMe. My colleague Patrick learned this firsthand when his UGREEN iDX6011 Pro NAS came with two heatsinks with bottom brackets, but only two pads—enough for just one side of each NVMe instead of both. So, if you're already spending the $5 to $10 it takes to buy an NVMe heatsink with a bottom bracket—or if you have a heatsink without a thermal pad—make sure to get a thermal pad that's thick (but not so thick that it can't be installed) and place it on the bottom bracket. It's such a cheap and easy step that it's not worth risking your NVMe over. Chill out! NVMe heatsinks with bottom brackets make a cheap but absolutely essential cooling upgrade if your NVMe has a double-sided design, so you should strongly consider purchasing one to protect your pricey drive. Most importantly, though, please don't forget to peel the clear plastic off the thermal pad before installing the NVMe!