Can you show some examples of throttles in reads?
If you look at TPU's last 10 NVMe drive reviews as an example 9 out of the 10 did not throttle reads at all even after 10 minutes of sustained peak reads. Only 1 drive, Crucial P5, throttled after over 3 minutes and even the reviewer noted that he can't remember another time it's happened in the test. Controller temperature difference is pretty dramatic between the sustained read and write scenarios, 10C or more (some I think almost 30C?).
It seems like it would essentially be extremely unlikely for the SSDs in the either console to throttle due to heat in most operating conditions. I'm not even seeing the possibility of 1st party games for Sony actually sustaining peak reads for prolonged duration (as in minutes at a time) in practice (not sure what it would be used for?).
Iroboto posted a link to it, twice now.
But to add to that, the specific 7 GB/s drive (Samsung 980 PRO) is relatively affordable due to moving to TLC, but that also means it's endurance has been halved compared to the 970 PRO. It's more of an upgrade to the 970 EVO than the 980 PRO.
Anyway, as to heat. Samsung did 2 things to attempt to control heat and mitigate throttling.
- There's a heat spreader over the controller chip.
- There's a copper backplate that helps to absorb heat.
The problem is that this was designed with the average PC use case in mind. Both of those are only able to absorb heat from brief bursts of high read speeds. After that neither are sufficient to cool the chips enough to keep the drive from throttling.
With the copper backplate it can absorb a limited amount of heat. Usually enough for a quick burst of activity that PC users currently see due to the file system and games being unable to maximize the potential of the SSD. Since it's on the back of the drive, there is pretty much no way to actively cool the copper backplate to a significant degree. It's similar for the controller chip. That heat spreader can absorb momentary increases in heat, but has limited ability to dissipate that heat rapidly.
So, it can handle, for example, a common PC use case of loading a game, then minutes going by before it needs to load another level. Or the relatively light duty of streaming in textures and data which is limited by the file system (small file i/o is SLOW on NVME drives MB/s and not GB/s, but still faster than HDD) and game design. This is going to change when DirectStorage and games designed for it arrive on PC. Without active cooling the drive is going to be in a throttled state likely the entire time a game is being played unless the PC user attaches heatsinks to the 980 PRO and combines that with active cooling.
Cheaper NVME drives from budget makers like ADATA, Patriot, etc. may not even have those. Meaning they'll throttle quicker and harder than the Samsung drive. Although ADATA's engineering sample drives did feature a metal heat spreader on the controller chip. So they might at least have that.
Regards,
SB