OCZ Vertex 460 SSD review

Memory (DDR4/DDR5) and Storage (SSD/NVMe) 367 Page 6 of 19 Published by

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SSD Operating Temperatures

Thermal Imaging Temperature Measurements

A new addition towards our reviews will be the inclusion of Forward Looking Infra Red thermal images of hardware. Over the past years we have been trying to figure out what the best possible way is to measure temperatures on hardware. Multiple options are available but the best thing to do is to visualize heat coming from the product or component being tested. The downside of thermal imaging hardware is simple, FLIR camera's with a bit of decent resolution costs up-to 10,000 EUR. Hence we passed on it for a long time. With a thermal imaging camera a special lens focuses the infrared light emitted by all of the objects in view. This focused light is scanned by a phased array of infrared-detector elements. The detector elements create a very detailed temperature pattern called a thermogram. It only takes about one-thirtieth of a second for the detector array to obtain the temperature information to make the thermogram. This information is obtained from several thousand points in the field of view of the detector array. The thermogram created by the detector elements is translated into electric impulses. The impulses are sent to a signal-processing unit, a circuit board with a dedicated chip that translates the information from the elements into data for the display. The signal-processing unit sends the information to the display, where it appears as various colors depending on the intensity of the infrared emission. The combination of all the impulses from all of the elements creates the image.

Why A Move Towards Thermal Imaging?

A new trend e.g. cheating is that manufacturers are tweaking their products with another offset, meaning that sometimes (and we have seen this only a couple of times) the temperature reported back by monitoring software often was lower than the product in reality is. With thermal imaging this becomes this becomes a thing of the past as we can seek hotspots on the PCB indicating for example GPU but also VRM temperature as well as how heat is distributed throughout a product. We do hope you will enjoy this new technology as it did cost us an arm and a leg to be able to implement it. 

So there's no cheating, hiding or covering up temperatures. There's nothing more precise than thermal imaging. 

 

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Above the SSD in IDLE. No activity at all. So let's quickly move on-wards to the SSD under stress.

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For FLIR thermal imaging we basically look at two or three point measurement, with the storage unit looped in a stress test. Above you can see that happening, overall the SSD remains cold. The M1 position is the RAM cache, the NAND storage remains chill at roughly 24 degrees C. The controller reaches 38 Degrees C, now I do need to point out that the controller cools itself with a thermal pad and the metal shell of the casing, both are removed here.

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