HELP! Temperature M.2 SSD Drive?! Optimus V2

Bonerhead

Member
Hello everyone,

Last week I ordered the Optimus V2 with the following configuration:

Hard Disk
NONE

2nd Hard Disk
NONE

mSATA/M.2 SSD Drive
256GB SAMSUNG SM951 M.2, PCIe NVMe (up to 2150MB/R, 1260MB/W)

But I see more and more complaints on this forum about the temperature of the M.2 SSD Drive. It gets very, very hot. I'm still in pre production so I can still change my order. What do you guys recommend? Switching from M.2 SSD Drive to a 250GB Samsung 850 EVO SSD drive?

When I look at the write/read speeds, the M.2 SSD is a lot faster then the normal Samsung 850 SSD. Why is this?

Any help would be much appreciated!

(sorry for my bad english!)
 

ahad

Silver Level Poster
my suggestion would be to switch for the moment. I read the reviews when i ordered mine and while this has exceptional speeds it overheats very quickly and throttles itself in no time. You're better off with an SSD thats not an NVMe for the moment.

As for why it's so much faster, its a PCIe drive and thus has access to much faster speeds...but as i said it throttles itself anyway because of the heat so its only this fast for short bursts. For the moment choose any other sata SSD.
 

Bonerhead

Member
my suggestion would be to switch for the moment. I read the reviews when i ordered mine and while this has exceptional speeds it overheats very quickly and throttles itself in no time. You're better off with an SSD thats not an NVMe for the moment.

As for why it's so much faster, its a PCIe drive and thus has access to much faster speeds...but as i said it throttles itself anyway because of the heat so its only this fast for short bursts. For the moment choose any other sata SSD.

Thank you for your quick reply! I find it strange that these temperatures with the M.2 PCIe drives are not mentioned on the pcspecialist.co.uk website. Temperatures like this will be heating up nearby components, which is not good..

I'm switching to the Samsung 850 Evo then.. Too bad, I was excited when I saw the speeds of the SamsungSM951 M.2 PCIe drive.
 

Parramatta

Silver Level Poster
Thank you for your quick reply! I find it strange that these temperatures with the M.2 PCIe drives are not mentioned on the pcspecialist.co.uk website. Temperatures like this will be heating up nearby components, which is not good..

I'm switching to the Samsung 850 Evo then.. Too bad, I was excited when I saw the speeds of the SamsungSM951 M.2 PCIe drive.

I'm doing the same thing. I was going to order a SM951 but when I saw the >100 degree temps and throttling to 1990s HDD speeds, the EVO SSD series is still fine.
 

mattd

Member
I've got one in my new defiance 2.

Not noticed anything overheating or any throttling. 2000MBs+ all the time for me.

Personally, loading time is the worst thing about modern games for me so I'd go with the SM951 then claim on warranty if/when it dies since it needs to be fit for purpose for pc specialist to sell it to us.
 

Parramatta

Silver Level Poster
I've got one in my new defiance 2.

Not noticed anything overheating or any throttling. 2000MBs+ all the time for me.

Personally, loading time is the worst thing about modern games for me so I'd go with the SM951 then claim on warranty if/when it dies since it needs to be fit for purpose for pc specialist to sell it to us.

How are your temperatures on anything that's disk intensive? Say, copying a 50GB folder to and fro?
 

mattd

Member
How are your temperatures on anything that's disk intensive? Say, copying a 50GB folder to and fro?

What are you using to measure temperatures?

And, realistically how often are you copying 50gb files around your drive all day every day?
 

n1ghtwish

Bronze Level Poster
What are you using to measure temperatures?

And, realistically how often are you copying 50gb files around your drive all day every day?

I was throwing this about last week, as my M2 Crucial SSD was the hottest running thing in my laptop (Even when not really doing anything). You can monitor temps with Piriform's Speccy application.

60C general operating temps are probably fine in a desktop, but in a laptop I didn't want something sat there generating so much heat when idle.

Below is a pic showing the temp difference between the Crucial MX200 M2 SSD and the Samsung 850 EVO SATA SSD. The Evo stays consistently at 30-40C, the Crucial was nudging 60C all the time for me no matter what I was doing.

q1tedGI.jpg


I think the M2 drives just run hotter, I don't think it's faulty, but it would be good if the PCS website noted this when ordering.
 

Stephen M

Author Level
It may be worth checking with them. I do not know what is considered acceptable for that drive but PCS briefly withdrew the laptop i7 4790 because of temperature issues
 

mattd

Member
Speccy cant read the temperatures of the nvme drive . It also gets the RAM on the GPU wrong.

Oh and after about 90 mins GTA5 on a 15 defiance 2 970 with the nvme drive, the CPU & GPU are both approximately 35-37c according to speccy. Crystal mark still showing 2100MB/s on the SeqQ32T1 test. Hardly worth worrying about I'd say - storm in a tea cup?
 
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Parramatta

Silver Level Poster
Speccy cant read the temperatures of the nvme drive . It also gets the RAM on the GPU wrong.

Oh and after about 90 mins GTA5 on a 15 defiance 2 970 with the nvme drive, the CPU & GPU are both approximately 35-37c according to speccy. Crystal mark still showing 2100MB/s on the SeqQ32T1 test. Hardly worth worrying about I'd say - storm in a tea cup?

Hmmm... I wonder what all this is about then... https://rog.asus.com/forum/showthre...write-speed-after-10-mins-in-Windows-10/page2

Very confusing.
 

Glissov

Bronze Level Poster
Found this while looking for a place to purchase one

How to avoid FUA command:

As this is not a SSD problem but NVMe driver policy behaviour.
The low performance was caused by the FUA(Forced Unit Access) command. It was originally blocked by the storage driver in MS Windows OS but the NVMe driver passes that command. And the benchmark tools that recently released invoke a bunch of FUA command so the performance of the SM951 NVMe dramatically goes down. MS is also aware of this issue and they are going to release a technical doc in MSDN near future. By that time, the way to avoid the FUA command is by checking “Turn off write-cache buffer” option (see below) under the device property of the SSD in your Device Manager”.

nvme-drivers-setting.jpg

Source:
http://www.flexxmemory.co.uk/solid-s...0000-oem-nvme/

Edit: Also users are talking about it here on this page (possible fix with Intel speedstep disabled in bios)

http://www.overclock.net/t/1551060/o...wners-club/310

Found this. Hopefully this is accurate and works, can't say for sure as I don't have my laptop yet. If anyone else tries this out, let us know please.
Can't say I would be happy checking that box though, especially since my OS is going on it.
 

Glissov

Bronze Level Poster
Sounds like nonsense to me - just tested again: GTA5 for 45 minutes then Crystal Mark immediately after exiting GTA5: 2153MBs For the defiance2 15inc with 970m at least, appears not to be an issue.

From what I have read, it's not low speeds ALL the time, it's short peaks of high performance and then slightly longer lows of poor performance and the biggest grief is that the poor performance is so utterly low. If you just check on crystal mark after a gaming session you are only snap shotting a small window of the overall performance and not the average, diagnostics need to be done over a longer period of time where you can easier witness fluctuations.
 

mattd

Member
From what I have read, it's not low speeds ALL the time, it's short peaks of high performance and then slightly longer lows of poor performance and the biggest grief is that the poor performance is so utterly low. If you just check on crystal mark after a gaming session you are only snap shotting a small window of the overall performance and not the average, diagnostics need to be done over a longer period of time where you can easier witness fluctuations.

Well so far every single time I've tested it (and I test it multiple times) its been 2000+. Every. Single. Time. If there was a temperature-induced drop in performance that lasted longer than times when it is higher-speed, I'd have seen it by now.

The laptop is not going to get any hotter than it does during high-end gaming, and the read speed appears to be unaffected by temperature.

Perhaps if I set it copying data around for an hour at a time then it might get hot, but that is unrealistic usage. GTA5 is in-game in under 30 seconds for example - with read speeds at 2gig a second, and capacity of 512gig, I find it hard to imagine when I'd get a real-world situation where I am going to be doing non-stop & intensive reading & writing of the disk for more than a minute or two at once since I could sequentially read the *entire disk* from start to finish in under 5 minutes.

tl;dr - its fine, no problem at all. No slowdowns due to temperature that I have seen under normal situations.
 
According to AnandTech (link) you would need to be copying at max speed for at least 2 minutes, which wouldn't be normal usage. It seems like there are solutions for desktops (link) even for extreme usage, but I assume that we won't be able to do anything to improve the cooling in a laptop. I'm planning on getting one of these for my laptop, as I assume that there will be sufficient cooling to not make this a problem.
 
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Parramatta

Silver Level Poster
Given that it's the only device capable of those speeds, it'd be impossible to copy, say, 50GB files to and from it at sustained maximum speeds, because everything else you're copying to/from e.g. USB flash, HDD, SSD, DVD will be slower.
 
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