Solved WD Black SN770 runs MUCH cooler than Samsung 970 EVO Plus

@pparks1

Thanks for that input. The more I hear about this mark (brand) from people like you, the more confident I feel that I'lll be satisfied with the purchases.

From left to right

990 Pro 1TB with stock mobo heatsink
970 EVO 1 TB with stock mobo heatsink
970 EVO 1 TB with stock mobo heatsink
SK Hynix P41 with no heatsink but has good airflow right over it.

@Scott

Thank you for that interesting and informative post. My higher power tellls me I have no more points to give out today, so this will have to do for now.

Wisewiz said:

Thank you for that interesting and informative post

Click to expand...

Thank you for the tip on showing drive temps with CrystalDiskInfo.

With HWiNFO64, for NVMe drives the temperature of the ASIC controller is usually Drive Temperature 3. This is also the case with the Elpis controller chip that is a part of my 2TB Samsung 980 PRO, and, Drive Temperature is the temperature of the NAND chips. Whereas Drive Temperature 2 is just a copy of Drive Temperature (due to how HWiNFO64 is designed, i.e. when there is no third temperature sensor present inside the SSD). To be able to get a handle on what goes on with the temperature of the SSD, I highly recommend to add both readouts to your Systray.

It's among reasons why I use ExplorerPatcher to bring back the Windows 10 taskbar. It's so I can see all the icons the whole time, and all of the time. (That is, by keeping the Always show all icons and notifications on the taskbar checkbox checked in Win+R ➜shell:::{05d7b0f4-2121-4eff-bf6b-ed3f69b894d9}, which is what I have been doing since early Win7 days...) Same deal with the package power and the package temperature of my CPU, all these extra icons allow me to put a finger on how much heat is going to get sucked up into the cooling fan and NOT have to deal with fancy widgets or popup-style overlays that either interfere with the visibility of stuff outside the taskbar or are incapable to keep the relevant info always visible (excepting while watching a movie or picture in fullscreen).

Great counsel, @hdmi !

Would you mind posting a shot of your tray icon layout? I’d like to see exactly what you see.

Thanks, friend.

Dan

Just a final postscript: The two on the left are WD Blacks, and they're on adapter cards in PCIe slots. The one on the right is the Samsung 970 EVO Plus, and it's still down in the corner, but with a somewhat better heat sink on it as of today. The new sink has brought the temp of that disk down 4-6° C, but it's still running much warmer than the WDs. Since it's just for backup storage, I think I'll leave it alone for now, but I'll replace it when the budget allows. Or not. Thanks to all of you helpful people for helping me with this issue.

Wisewiz said:

Just a final postscript: The two on the left are WD Blacks, and they're on adapter cards in PCIe slots. The one on the right is the Samsung 970 EVO Plus, and it's still down in the corner, but with a somewhat better heat sink on it as of today. The new sink has brought the temp of that disk down 4-6° C, but it's still running much warmer than the WDs. Since it's just for backup storage, I think I'll leave it alone for now, but I'll replace it when the budget allows. Or not. Thanks to all of you helpful people for helping me with this issue.

View attachment 84565

Click to expand...

Hi,
Hows your 980 and 970 evo + compared to each other on your other system ?
980 pro I have seems to idle a little cooler and maxes out at around 53c and not 60-63c on 970 evo + I have sitting in a drawer.
But yeah my 970 evo + seemed to always be around 44c but it's always a os drive only 500gb and all.

@ThrashZone

System 2; both Samsung. Left is OS, down in the corner of the box. Right is idle, on an adapter in a PCI Express slot.


I still don't know why my Sys 1 Samsung runs so warm (45° C, idle). Maybe it's just that it forgot its sunglasses. That's @Ghot's theory, anyway.

So os is the 970 evo + ?
Not bad if so mine never saw 35c well shortly after startup hehe

Yep. The 35 on Sys 2 is the OS, on a 970 EVO Plus, down on the mobo.

Wisewiz said:

Yep. The 35 on Sys 2 is the OS, on a 970 EVO Plus, down on the mobo.

Click to expand...

You ever think about swapping systems to see if the 970's react differently ?
Otherwise it's down to heatsink differences ?

@ThrashZone

I think I've done enough messing around inside my main box for a while, now. It's not that it's difficult; these SFF boxes offer essentially tool-less hardware operations. But every time I remove the lid and the bezel and pivot up the main drive housing to get access to everything, I feel a kind of stress that I would rather not feel. I'm just old and tired. As these Samsungs age (like me), I'll replace them with WD Blacks, and we'll see what comes of that. Tx again for your support.

Wisewiz said:

@ThrashZone

I think I've done enough messing around inside my main box for a while, now. It's not that it's difficult; these SFF boxes offer essentially tool-less hardware operations. But every time I remove the lid and the bezel and pivot up the main drive housing to get access to everything, I feel a kind of stress that I would rather not feel. I'm just old and tired. As these Samsungs age (like me), I'll replace them with WD Blacks, and we'll see what comes of that. Tx again for your support.

Click to expand...

In the immortal words of the big guy
C'mon man hehe

Cloned and reinstalled mine back in, hell looks like it likes efi install better than legacy win-11

I would not worry too much about the temperatures. Some chips need higher temperatures than others. A good operating temp is typically between 30 and 50C. If it's too cold, it's not as reliable as when a bit warmer. But also too hot is not good...some should not go over 65C for longer times while others are happy going up to 85C. The warmer the chips the easier it is to do the switching of states within the chips.

All chips are different. Some industrial chips work well between -50 - +80C, while others don't work well under +30C at all.

In a typical consumer SSD, for endurance the ideal operating temperature for the NAND chips is around 40 degrees Celsius with the optimum range (again, for the NAND chips...) indeed being typically between 30 and 50 or thereabout. BUT... by frequently letting the NAND chips hover in the low 50s you still aren't sacrificing that much endurance. So, if you don't believe in homeopathy, then you shouldn't have to worry about the magnitude of this effect unless maybe if the NAND chips are getting a lot closer to 60 most of the time (or worse). But that's for the NAND chips. The controller chip on an NVMe SSD is a completely different animal. On most NVMe SSDs the operating temperature of that one should ideally stay below 70, but then, most NVMe SSDs start to throttle to protect theirself against overheating anyway in the first place. On a Samsung NVMe SSD, this throttling mechanism is called Dynamic Thermal Guard. Like I earlier said, monitor both the temperature sensor of the NAND chips and the temperature sensor of the controller chip.

There is quite simply no need to switch to WD_BLACKs before knowing how the thermal characteristics and endurance factually are like. As a matter of fact, the WD SN850 is known to run hotter than the Samsung 980 PRO, and, by the time your SSDs will be too old, chances will be that nobody else except the antique dealers will still be talking about the WD_BLACKs. The main reason why the Samsung 980 PRO is like a whole dozen times more popular choice than the WD SN850/SN850X is because the difference in performance doesn't usually begin to justify the price gap even though the SN850/SN850X is faster than the 980 PRO. As for the Samsung 970 EVO Plus... it performs slower than the 980 PRO, it runs hotter than the 980 PRO if the data transfer speed is kept the same, and often times you'll also actually even find that it is more expensive than the 980 PRO (not cheaper). lol Another, additional, raason why I went for the 980 PRO instead of the 970 EVO Plus was because the 980 PRO uses the Microsoft StorNVMe driver. The 970 EVO Plus has lost a fairly big part of its initial relevancy to the 980 PRO, which is no suprise because, even though it is a fair bit newer than the 970 EVO Plus, the 980 PRO was released more than 3 whole years ago. Best bang for the buck right now is very often (but certainly not always) the 980 PRO with heatsink. So much so, there's not that much point left in still buying an unused 970 EVO Plus anymore now. The same also applies to the WD_BLACKs...

For any of the Samsung SSDs, the Pro models are better than the EVO models.
That's also why the Pro models are more expensive.

Wow! That's a lot of information and some good opinions to consider. Thanks, @hdmi.

@Ghot I didn't know that. It's hard to keep up with the branding practices of these companies. Thanks.