PNY unveils 12GB/s PCIe 5.0 SSD with dual cooling fans

[midian182]

In brief: PNY has joined the list of companies making PCIe 5.0 SSDs that are so hot they require active cooling. Its new model comes with not one but two cooling fans attached to the heatsink, making the drive look somewhat like a tiny graphics card.

PNY says its new CS3150 SSD leverages the NVMe PCIe Gen 5 x4 interface to offer sequential read speeds of up to 12 GB/s and sequential writes of 11 GB/s. Those specs only apply to the 2TB model, but the 1TB versions still boast an incredibly fast 11.5 GB/s reads and 8.5 GB/s writes.

As we've seen with other PCIe 5.0 SSDs, those sorts of blistering speeds require a hefty cooling solution. PNY isn't taking any chances here, packing two fans – one on each end – onto each of the CS3150's three available heatsink options: Black, White, and RGB.

Powering the fans requires plugging in a 4-pin power connector, and if you feel that your system would benefit from even more RGB, that model uses a 9-pin (USB) power connector for customizing color, lighting effects, and fan speeds via PNY's Velocity-X software.

PNY says the dual-fan heatsink is designed to keep the Gen 5 x4 SSD running cool and prevent performance throttling, assuring consistent performance even in demanding situations. They are backward compatible with PCIe 4.0 and earlier platforms, but you obviously won't see their full speeds when not using PCIe 5.0.

PNY didn't reveal certain specifications, such as the controller used in the CS3150 (it looks like the Phison PS5026-E26) and its random read/write speeds. The company is pushing the PCIe 5.0 drive as being ideal for PC enthusiasts, gamers, and content creators. There's also mention of the SSD taking full advantage of Microsoft DirectStorage, though only a few games support it right now, including Forspoken and Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart.

PCIe 5.0 SSDs remain pricey. The CS3150 has an MSRP of $179.99 for the black and (likely) white models, while the RGB drive is $189.99. PNY didn't say how much the 2TB capacity variant would cost. They will be available this December.

Highlighting the importance of extreme cooling solutions in PCIe 5.0 SSDs, a test in May showed that Crucial's T700 PCIe 5.0 SSD throttled to HDD speeds without a heatsink.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/100861-pny-unveils-pcie-50-ssds-dual-cooling-fans.html

 

[poshflamingos]

What's the Q1T1 random read speeds? Still at 100 MB/s? Yeah? Ok, into the gargabe it goes.

SSD manufacturers advertising completely irrelevant QD32 sequential read speeds is one of the biggest scams that have ever taken hold on the PC market.

 

[OortCloud]

Not wishing to sound like an old bas***rd but.... when I was a lad, if you had stuffed fans on top of processors or drives etc to keep them cool we would have regarded it as a ridiculous thing to do and told you to sort your engineering out so your product was capable of running within its designed thermal limits, or turn down the speed it's trying to run at. Wonder if my Atari 2600 could have run Crysis with a few fans and some liquid metal?

 

[Uncle Al]

Not even 1 Tb? What a waste .....

 

[ChrisH1]

Not wishing to sound like an old bas***rd but.... when I was a lad, if you had stuffed fans on top of processors or drives etc to keep them cool we would have regarded it as a ridiculous thing to do and told you to sort your engineering out so your product was capable of running within its designed thermal limits, or turn down the speed it's trying to run at.

Another oldie here; in my day I was mainly working on IBM mainframes, and they were all liquid cooled. To be fair, Amdahl patented technology that allowed air-cooled cpus in the late ‘70s, but there comes a point where you say, ‘well, I can get 700 [units of your choice relating to processing power] out of this thing on air, or 1,200 on liquid cooling, and the cooling solution doesn’t cost much and the customers want the power’ so you do it. The current IBM z-series machines have the cpus in a large block of metal, with a lot of cooling going through them, but that could probably be counted as ‘within its designed thermal limits’ as it’s designed like that from the ground up.

 

[ChrisH1]

One of my concerns is, and it should be easy to answer if someone has tried them out, those are teeny tiny little fans, and to get much airflow they will have to go at speed; what’s the noise factor? I hope we won’t be getting an annoying mosquito-like whine out of our ssds in the future.

 

[Manu Arg]

Clearly not for everyone. Adding two points of failure that will throttle the performance to a product that should last for .... 5 years at least, is a silly idea.

But then again, this is not for the mainstream.

 

[Vanderlinde]

Not wishing to sound like an old bas***rd but.... when I was a lad, if you had stuffed fans on top of processors or drives etc to keep them cool we would have regarded it as a ridiculous thing to do and told you to sort your engineering out so your product was capable of running within its designed thermal limits, or turn down the speed it's trying to run at. Wonder if my Atari 2600 could have run Crysis with a few fans and some liquid metal?

Those things consume around 10 to 15W at full speed. SSD's do have a thermal limit and when that occurs the speeds are tuned down. You don't buy a high end ssd like this to have it run at tuned down speeds.

The coolers pretty much only engage when it's needed - and due to the mass of the heatsink that might be even 3 minutes or so.

Would not be worried too much about it. Some boards do provide a heatsink so you would not even need it.

 

[Shadownovascotia]

Not wishing to sound like an old bas***rd but.... when I was a lad, if you had stuffed fans on top of processors or drives etc to keep them cool we would have regarded it as a ridiculous thing to do and told you to sort your engineering out so your product was capable of running within its designed thermal limits, or turn down the speed it's trying to run at. Wonder if my Atari 2600 could have run Crysis with a few fans and some liquid metal?

I’m not sure you understand engineering or thermal design. If you want to use inferior products because they don’t use active cooling, be my guest. Seems like a ridiculous complaint.

 

[OortCloud]

I’m not sure you understand engineering or thermal design. If you want to use inferior products because they don’t use active cooling, be my guest. Seems like a ridiculous complaint.

I understand it just fine thanks. It's not complicated. I've worked in embedded systems and electrical engineering all my life. If you want 30 fans inside your system all blowing hot air on to each other as more and more components argue to get 'active cooled' using fans, be my guest.

 

[PaladinNH]

1) It just looks ridiculous, and 2) I certainly won't be buying one, but to be fair, this is how innovation happens, right? Go PNY, I'm all for it. Though, those tiny fans could get pretty whiny, as I think back to the Southbridge fan on my Athlon 64 making the most godawful sound every time I turned on the pc.

 

[toooooot]

Triple fan let's do it!
Can we have an awesome ssd with a triple fan?
It would be amazing if someone actually made a tiny copy of a GPU heatsink and fans.

 

[toooooot]

Clearly not for everyone. Adding two points of failure that will throttle the performance to a product that should last for .... 5 years at least, is a silly idea.

But then again, this is not for the mainstream.

Heatsink should still be enough especially since a lot of people don't write to SSD all the time.
Which is why even as hot, this nvme would most likely be just fine with a broken fan.