 Holy smokes, that's hot. This thing's running at 105 degrees. That can't be right. Ow, dang it. That cannot be good for it. SSDs are supposed to have three major benefits over mechanical hard drives, performance, longevity, and of course, efficiency. So how is it that we've come to this? A water-cooled SSD. Only the next 15 minutes can tell us the answer. And it's brought to you by iFixit. Do you like repairing your own electronics instead of spending hundreds on expensive replacement or repair services? Use iFixit and learn more about iFixit's essential electronics toolkit at the link below or at the end of this video. I guess step one is to open this thing up and see what the heck is going on here. You know what's funny is the thing is we actually did water-cooling SSD, coincidentally, one of Corsair's about a year ago with fascinating results. What's most fascinating about those results is that Corsair presumably watched that video and then came out with this. This is the MP600 Pro. Not only does it feature water cooling, but it can actually be plumbed into your custom liquid cooling loop, meaning that this thing should be the coolest SSD on the market. There we go. Thermal pad, nice copper block, you won't get any corrosion from adding aluminum parts to your loop. No actual fins or anything on the inside surface of the block. I can see in there. You got a Fizen E18 controller. It's a nice high-end controller, PCI Express Gen 4. You've got presumably, what about two gigs probably of DDR3 memory and then two terabytes of 3D TLC NAND. That's rated for 3,600 terabytes written. So very high-end SSD. Here's a funny thing. The heat spreader that goes on the bottom side of the drive. Okay, so it's got thermal pad there too for the RAM chip and then four, yep, four NAND packages that are back there. That one doesn't actually connect to the water cooling thermally in any way, but there could be a good engineering reason for that. You see, there's conflicting evidence out there as to whether or not cooling the NAND flash is actually beneficial. The old wisdom, back when we made our original video, was actually that cooling it could make it not last as long. But then there's new research that seems to indicate that going too hot could increase errors and basically just the cooler, the better, may be true like with pretty much any other integrated circuits. Of course though, even if cooling the NAND is good, the hottest component on this device is absolutely this controller. And that's the one that if it goes too hot is going to affect our performance. So that's what the water block's attached to. Let's go ahead and reattach it, shall we? Now this is a little awkward. In order to install our water-cooled SSD, we actually have to remove this chunky heat sink with sexy RGB on it and this thermal pad and put them here so that we can have this here. Oh crap, I put the water block on upside down. Up till this point in the video, we may have actually been very unfair to Corsair. Something neither you nor I considered is that on most motherboards, the highest performance M.2 slot is actually extremely close to the CPU socket because it has to be connected directly to CPU PCIe lanes. What that means is that it also happens to be directly behind the super hot back plate of your graphics card. This thing might need water cooling more than we thought. No, no. You know what, let's give it- One fan you'd be fine. Let's give it a try. Let's give it a try. So we're gonna run a control, okay, with just the SSD, with just the heat sink on it and see if it slows down under a stress test. Ready, go. It's going now. Hey, there it goes. All right, we got total activity 100% on our drive. He's ramping up, boys. Wait, holy shit balls. We have a Core i9-11900K pegged at 90% usage, just sharding data onto and then reading it off of this drive. Oh yeah, the test that I made up slams it. This is not what we expected to happen. You can see this red line here is from yesterday. The drive went, whoa, it's so hot in here and thermal throttled. And today, thanks to our magnificently, you're welcome, air conditioned warehouse workspace, the drive did not actually reach the 70 degree thermal throttling point, making it only to 68. That's not nice. Remember how I mentioned before that one of the challenges for an SSD sitting right there between the CPU and GPU is that when you're gaming or doing anything else intensive, it could heat up even more than it otherwise would? Well, we're just gonna run FurMark and we're gonna try this again. Good luck everyone. Something to note is our curve might look a little bit different this time because we didn't let it cool all the way down as we're trying to thermal throttling. That's the whole point. Well, that's just great. We peaked at 79 degrees and definitely thermal throttled, but we thermal throttled like to hell and back. We went from almost two gigabytes a second to one gigabyte a second reads. That's good. Hypothesis proved that GPU being nearby is bad and it can thermal throttle. All right, well, let's add water cooling. Of course, depending who you ask, there's a lot of different ways that you can water cool a product. Remember back when I got that water cooled kit of memory that just had water in it, but it wasn't actually circulating? Well, I have a theory that we could actually get away with doing something similar here, just filling the SSD with water and then sealing it up. In a nutshell, what we're doing by throwing water in here is we're adding kind of thermal inertia. We're making it so that when the drive is under heavy load, let's say we're editing 12K video or something like that, it takes a lot of thermal energy for that water to actually change its own temperature because water's awesome. Thank you, water. You're amazing. Then what'll happen is we will stop doing what we're doing and it will be able to dissipate that heat. So it's really great for absorbing bursty loads, but maybe not as good for long sustained ones. Now, if there weren't thermal protections built into this product, I would never recommend doing something like this. Because the drive cannot exceed 70 degrees, it's probably fine, but if you had something that could get to boiling temperature, you could create a lot of pressure in there and like blow a gasket and the water everywhere. Now actually seems like a really good time to explain the test that we're using to thermal throttle our SSD. We're using a tool called Iometer, which was developed by Intel back in the 90s and then open sourced in the 2000s. It's not particularly user friendly, but what it is is extremely customizable. So the way we've got it configured here is we've set our maximum disk size to 40 million sectors, which means basically we're working with a 20 gigabyte file. It's important that this is more than the amount of system memory we have. Then in terms of our access specifications, we're hitting it with four kibby byte accesses, it's not quite the same as a kilobyte, but don't worry about it. And they are 50% reads, 50% writes, and it's all sequential. So we are just slamming this thing. One other really important thing we had to do is change the results display update frequency to two seconds. Otherwise this drive is so fast that it would actually just throttle at the CPU level if we tried to update more often than that. So ha ha, fascinating results. The red is without water cooling and the green is, well, filling up our block with water. So as expected, the green one takes quite a bit longer to reach that 80 degree thermal throttle point. But then what we didn't expect is that it doesn't throttle all the way back to 70 degrees and doesn't tank the performance to nearly the same degree. Although the performance gets extremely inconsistent. So this is the actual drive write performance. Isn't that fascinating? All right, let's do it properly now. Oh, we, ah, hot. Oh, wow, that's hot water. Oh man, this is just, it feels wrong, you know? Here we go. Water-cooled SSD, ladies and gentlemen. We mocked it at the start of this video, but it could be necessary, nay, essential for your gaming enjoyment. What the heck is going on? It's having a little- I've never seen that. Having a little freak out here. No, I know what it is. There's no freaking restriction in the loop. That block is basically just a U-turn. Like it's not, there's no micro fins or anything like that. You could get really high flow rates through a single component loop. But these days, everything, CPUs, GPUs, they've got these like impingement jet things, these little micro fins that are hard for the water to get through. So you never see stuff like this anymore. I hadn't seen anything go like this in years. Well, that's great for cooling. It means our flow rate is gonna be terrific. Check this out. Our drive is at 19 degrees. 19 degrees, ladies and gentlemen. 60 minutes? Sure. Okay, what do you think? Is it gonna throttle? There it goes. It went up by a degree, two degrees. We're back. And this is amazing. We managed to reach a maximum of 29 degrees over the course of a full hour long test. And our performance basically still got some of that inconsistency. Although that's probably more down to drive garbage collection and like NAND write speed limits more than anything else. But it did stay higher than any of our other tests. So in conclusion, water cooling your SSD is completely unnecessary. And we've even done the math to prove it. The thing is, under normal circumstances, it is conceivable that your CPU or your graphics card could be 100% loaded for extended periods of time, whether you're gaming or running some kind of render or simulation. So when we test those components, that's why we hit them so hard to ensure that they won't thermal throttle under those conditions. But with an SSD, you normally only hit it with very short bursty loads at a time. And when I say normally, I mean, almost always outside of industrial or server applications. So get this, at the speed of this drive, which it's writing at about two gigabytes a second this entire time, it would manage to write over the course of an hour. Actually, you can see it. Hardware info has done the math for us. It has written a total of 22.8 gigabytes, just running this benchmark. To put that in perspective, because of the performance of this drive, at its 1400 terabytes rated write endurance, it would actually burn itself out in a span of somewhere between three and four days. Now, obviously Corsair doesn't expect anyone to actually use the drive like this because they estimate it would take about 280 years to fully utilize the write endurance of this drive because they think you'd probably do about 32 gigabytes a day. I would say their estimate is actually probably on the high side in terms of how much you'd write a day. So this thing should last for a really fricking long time, unless of course you are stupid enough to run benchmarks like this that could actually cause it to thermal throttle because then, check this out, we managed to use 2% of our drive endurance just sitting here benchmarking it to make this video. So is water cooling good for your SSD? Maybe, but only if you were going to kill it in some other way. The one saving grace for this product is that the price of the MP600 Pro air-cooled version is 450 some odd dollars, and the price for the water-cooled version is actually $469. So at least it's not really costing you any extra, assuming that you already had a water-cooled system, and it certainly does run cooler, especially in that slot that's got all these heat generating components around it. That is a very mangled conclusion. Almost as mangled as the segue to our sponsor. iFixit sponsored today's video. Their Essentials Electronics Toolkit is a great basic kit for new users. It has everything you need for your most essential electronics repairs. It's compact, it includes the most popular precision bits that you'll need, and they're all held in place with high density foam so you won't lose them. You might lose them, but it'll be on you. You can throw it around without any of the bits falling out, and they've got a lifetime warranty, and you can get it at ifixit.com slash LTT. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe go check out the one where we water-cooled an SSD, but we did it our way. The jank way. This is actually kind of pro. It's pretty good. I'm kind of sold if it's only a $15 adder. You do have to buy fittings too though.