Samsung 950 PRO M.2 SSD review - SSD Operating Temperatures

Thermal Imaging Temperature Measurements

A new addition to our reviews is 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 cameras 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.

Samsung indicated that they are thermally throttling the controller. Which made us curious. See, if Samsung implements such a feature then they surely have an issue with overheating. From what we can tell, at roughly 75 Degrees C the controller will start to down-clock, and thus that will have an effect on write performance.

We threw the thermal camera at the SSD, and indeed under continued writing the controller lights up pretty significantly. We measure 75 Degrees C at the controller core (M1).  This however is a heavy stress activity test. But yeah that is on the high side. We foresee some heat sinks in future products to be able to adapt to heat.