Thermalright HR10 works great

[LigTasm]

I bought one of these little guys to go on my OS drive which is right up against my GPU. Originally I had a different block-style heatsink on the drive and it was hovering around 70C when I was gaming, which is acceptable but far from ideal.

I just wanted to give it a try, as for $16 its not a big loss if it was noisy or didn't work well but I was pleasantly surprised. This thing keeps my 990 Pro (or SN850X, I have tried both) at 40C max right next to a 7900XTX. I oriented the fan to blow towards the GPU instead of pulling hot air directly from the backplate. The fan is super quiet, I think I have it running at about 50% right now. I plugged it in an held it up to my ear and I can just barely hear it running.

Anyways, if you have the space and need it for a hot gen4 or gen 5 drive, I highly recommend this thing.

Block style heatsinks vs the HR10 (and temps during 2 hours of Helldivers 2):

 

[GotNoRice]

That's a neat cooler, but NAND flash is one of those things that sort of breaks the mold when it comes to electronics and temperatures. Flash memory actually has much better endurance at hotter temperatures compared to colder temperatures. The only thing that actually benefits from cooling is the controller/processor chip on the SSD. If the added cooling is the difference between the controller throttling or not throttling, then you will get better performance with the cooler. But as long as the controller is not throttling, then it's actually better to let that flash memory run warm. I don't think that the controller was in any danger of throttling at 70C, and your flash memory was likely very cozy at that temperature.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8538043/

Temperature effects should be well considered when designing flash-based memory systems, because they are a fundamental factor that affect both the performance and the reliability of NAND flash memories. In this work, aiming to comprehensively understanding the temperature effects on 3D NAND flash memory, triple-level-cell (TLC) mode charge-trap (CT) 3D NAND flash memory chips were characterized systematically in a wide temperature range (−30~70 °C), by focusing on the raw bit error rate (RBER) degradation during program/erase (P/E) cycling (endurance) and frequent reading (read disturb). It was observed that (1) the program time showed strong dependences on the temperature and P/E cycles, which could be well fitted by the proposed temperature-dependent cycling program time (TCPT) model; (2) RBER could be suppressed at higher temperatures, while its degradation weakly depended on the temperature, indicating that high-temperature operations would not accelerate the memory cells’ degradation; (3) read disturbs were much more serious at low temperatures, while it helped to recover a part of RBER at high temperatures.

 

[LigTasm]

That's a neat cooler, but NAND flash is one of those things that sort of breaks the mold when it comes to electronics and temperatures. Flash memory actually has much better endurance at hotter temperatures compared to colder temperatures.

Cold temperatures are not 30-40C. Cold temperatures are COLD (like -20C). I don't really care if the NAND performs slightly better at 70C, what I want is the drive to not throttle and cause stuttering which it definitely does at 70C average temps.