Samsung 960 Pro 2TB NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD Review

Samsung SSD 960 Pro 2TB Temperatures

Temperatures have always played a critical role on storage drives and in recent years we’ve seen it cause drives to fail prematurely and we’ve even seen some SSD performance results change for the worse if components were too hot or too cold. Since temperature is an important thing to keep an eye on we check the idle and load temperatures on all of the drives that we review. To get the idle temperature results we leave the drive sitting on an open air test bench in a room that is 20C. For the load numbers we use IOMeter to write 128KB to the drive sequentially for 4 minutes and record the top temperature.

On our open air test bench that was in an air conditioned room with a ceiling fan and with a case fan blowing across the board, we found that the Samsung SSD 960 Pro 2TB drive an idle temperature of 32C and it topped out at 70C after doing 4 minutes of straight 128KB sequential writes with IOMeter. This heavy workload wrote 43GB of data to the drive, which is approximately the size of a standard Blu-ray disk. This might not be normal for everyone, but most prosumers will likely move that much data around at any given time.While the temperature rose to 70C we did not notice any thermal throttling in the performance log, but the drive did have airflow around it. If you place this drive in laptops or enclosures with poor airflow you’ll likely see it throttle. The operating range of this drive is

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