 Pretty much every component of a modern system can be water-cooled these days, but there's one notable exception that almost no one seems to do. The SSD, which raises the question, why don't we water cool SSDs? Especially when it turns out that we actually do have the power. Meet the AlphaCool MCX little tiny water cooling block that I will be using to not only liquid cool this MP600 SSD from Corsair, but also determine whether we can get any performance benefit out of it. And this video is brought to you by GlassWire. Instantly see your past and current network activity, detect malware, block badly behaving apps, and more on your PC and Android device. Use offer code LINUS to get 25% off GlassWire at the link below. Before we get started with any adorable water cooling though, we need to establish that our MP600 SSD here actually has a chance of benefiting from additional cooling. I mean, Corsair obviously thought so, they went and they put this gigantic heat sink on the thing. But that doesn't mean necessarily that there's a performance benefit to it. It could just be to help the thing last longer or to help it operate normally in situations where it doesn't have any airflow. So in order to find out if it even suffers from thermal throttling in the first place, we need one of these. Now, this is a little bit on the overkill side. We've got an epic 7742 64 core processor, two terabytes of RAM, a GTX Titan X, all that good stuff. We don't really need any of that. What we need is a PCI Express Gen 4 M.2 slot. So we're going to be using the one down here at the bottom because this SSD is capable of blisteringly fast sequential read and write speeds, but only as long as it's cooled properly. So let's go ahead and get that installed. To figure all of that out and stress our SSD to the max without venturing beyond the realm of the real world, I'm going to be using a fun little script that Anthony from our team created called the looping file copy test. So you can see I'm actually moving a test file over. So this is a 10 gig Cineform 1080p video file. And then I'm going to copy these five items. I've got two folders, LTX and LTX2. Output, that's a text file that tells us what exactly our copy time was. And this test batch file as well as the P time application. And we're done. So what it's going to do is when we run this test batch file, it's going to take everything that's in the LTX folder and copy it over to LTX2. Then it's going to take everything in LTX2 copy it back to LTX1. Oh, wow. That was not expected. All right. As I was saying before, I was so rudely interrupted. We've got four instances of our looping file copy test. And what's going to happen is that once we run the batch file with our 10 gig file in there, it is going to constantly copy the contents of LTX into LTX2. And when it's done doing that, it's going to copy it back. And then it's going to copy over that, copy over that and keep going ad nauseum, throwing the results in output.txt. So you can see it's completing these transactions in about four and a half to five seconds right now. So if we experience thermal throttling, we would expect those results to start to degrade over time or degrade this way. Go up is more worse for this. Before we do that, let's start with a baseline Crystal Disk Mark run here with the drive just in a not quite idle state because we just copied some files, but basically. Dang, these PCI Express Gen 4 drives are fast. Five gigabytes a second. Those are pretty great results. Anywhere from three to five gigabytes a second sequential reads and writes. But that's without my background file copy tests running at the same time. So I'm going to launch four of those just like that. Also, I have another fun trick. I want to have a look at how hot this thing is running. And I happen to have just the tool. This thing is so cool. I love it. Come on, baby. That's hot. Now that's hot. Now this is metal, which can have emissivity issues, but it's black and it's matte. So I'm hoping that it's not going to be too bad. And it looks like we are anywhere in the neighborhood of around 50 to 52 degrees on our heat sink here. But this test is just getting started right now. Curiously, we were well over 50 degrees and now we're just over 40. But my test didn't finish. Not only that, but it's got the option to run it again. I think this just completely erred out. So I don't think I'm going to have the option of running Crystal Disk Mark while my batch files are running in the background, which means I'm going to have to rely on those text output files. Now our SSD is plugged into a Zenith 2 Threadripper board. And it's right here in between the PCI Express slots. I installed, I didn't really install it. I just kind of chucked it on there. A PCI Express card to simulate what it's like for it to not have any direct airflow. And we have the stress test running. So you can see we're actually, we've got almost five gigabytes a second of disk activity happening here at a Q depth of about five. And our drive is reporting in hardware info about 68 degrees. But I don't think that's right because check this out, ladies and gentlemen. 75 degrees max here running this test. It's awful. It's a travesty. One small fly in my ointment, however, is that even after all of this time, it's been running for about 40 minutes now. I haven't noticed any difference in the execution time of this file copy. So it doesn't seem to be throttling. Yep, still consistent. All of them are consistent. So you might be thinking to yourself, gee Linus, Corsair made a pretty well-designed cooler for their SSD. I guess that screws over your whole video concept, doesn't it? To which I would reply, no, in fact, it doesn't because there are more reasons to water cool than just preventing your stuff from thermal throttling. Maybe you just want it to last long. Everyone knows that integrated circuits will last for a longer period of time, the cooler that you can keep them operating during their lifetime. So we're going to proceed with our little Frankenstein cooling experiment anyway, starting by removing the existing heat sink and backplate. Keen-eyed among you might have noticed that lack of thermal interface material between the backplate and these NAND flash chips. The reason for that is that not every component of an SSD needs to be cooled equally. So the controller right here, that follows the normal laws of cooler temperatures being basically better, at least till you get to like, you know, deep in the sub-zeros. NAND flash on the other hand, is actually rated by JDEC at 40 degrees centigrade. And apparently, if it goes down to about room temperature, about 25 degrees, and you write to it, its write endurance can be as little as half of what it is at its rated 40 degree temperature. So they are supposed to run a little bit warm. So if I were to just take a water cooler and slap it on this thing, I could actually cool certain components of it too much. So we're going to start by just putting a water block onto the controller. Wow, am I good or what? Freaking nailed it. A little wipe down with alcohol ensures that our thermal adhesive will stick better. That's really important because once we've got tubes hanging off this thing and all that's holding it on is some double-sided tape, we want it to stick as well as it possibly can. Oh, wow, that didn't stick at all. Uh-oh. Well, that's actually on there pretty good. But just for safety, I'm going to throw a zip tie on here. You know you like it. Come on, I've seen worse mounting mechanisms. But just because we can't water cool the flash chips doesn't mean they shouldn't have any cooling whatsoever. So we're going to go ahead and put on something kind of, you know, similar to what Corsair had before. We're going to put some heat sinks on them on the one side. So hopefully they should soak up some of the heat, not just from the chip on this side, but also the one on the other. I still remember making these little heat sinks back when I was a young enthusiast in AliExpress, you know, with something like this for three bucks didn't exist. I just, I cut up some chipset heat sinks off of a dead board or something like that and then sanded down the bottoms of them so they were nice and smooth. That is our custom water cooled SSD. Let's get this thing installed. Before I can actually test the drive though, I need to solve a small problem. We're using this teeny tiny little, I think this is like 1 16th inch tubing to run to this teeny tiny water block. Problem is all the standard G1 quarter fittings we have lying around in the PC workshop here are like quarter inch or three eighths at the smallest. So clearly that's not gonna work. Fortunately, we have many different tubings and a handful of adapters. Adapter number one takes us from three eighths inch on our normal water cooling equipment down to quarter inch. Adapter number two takes us from quarter inch down to little tiny, I think this is one eighth inch, it might be even smaller. There we go. Not bad, right? Not bad at all. So all that's left now is to find out if it works. We're just gonna fill up our water cooling loop, lttstore.com and fire this bad boy up. Hey, there it is. All right. Why don't we just like create a copy here, make sure it's set. Yep. Got a couple of gigabytes a second, a file copy transfer nonsense. Let's fire up hardware info and see what our temps are like. Oh, dang. We down at 29 degrees now, boys and girls. Now our thermal camera results are not going to be comparable to what we had before because the block in particular is quite shiny, it's quite reflective, so we can't trust the readings off of it. But we at least know that our PCB is running on the right side but we at least know that our PCB is running at a chilly 26 and a 26 high, 27 low degrees. That's pretty darn good. Now let's hit it with a stress test, shall we? Everything's working as expected with our four tests running. We're in the neighborhood of four gigabytes, four plus gigabytes per second. Now let's fire up hardware info where we're sitting at a chilly 40 degrees on wherever the heck that sensor is. We're starting to see a few hotspots so we can see our NAND flash is heating up. That's right about where we want it though, right in that 40 degree sort of range. So it's been running for an hour. There's a bit of an anomaly in the data right here where it took a hundred seconds to copy one way and then the other. I think that's when the computer went to sleep because apparently I forgot to disable that. But other than that, we've got some pretty good looking results where no, our drive does not in fact throttle and it's running at full speed even now after an hour of operation. And perhaps more importantly, check this out. We're getting like five gigabytes a second of disk I.O. There it is, 5.8. It's crazy. Perhaps more importantly though, it is running at a near 50 degrees according to hardware info. And when we whip out our thermal camera, pretty much everything about this is optimal. So we can check that PCB temperature right between our NAND flash. That's around 50 degrees. Perfect. So we're not over cooling the flash chips. Then we get right in here kind of around the, around the SOC, you know, what in the 40s, something along those lines. That's looking pretty chill. And actually it turns out our DRAM doesn't heat up very much at all in this kind of a use case where we're just sequentially copying to and from the drive. I mean, can we declare victory at this point, Brennan? Yeah. I mean, you can't install anything in the slot next to it unless you kind of wouldn't be able to install anything there. It's kind of jank. These might fall off if you actually orient. Okay, it has issues, but it runs cooler. It runs fast. And we did the whole thing for just a few bucks. That little, little tiny water block. It's like $7. How can you go wrong? Just like you can't go wrong with our sponsor for today's video, Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one website building platform that makes it easy to build an online presence. All you got to do is pick one of their award-winning templates and bring your website to life and stand out. I mean, you don't want your site to look like it's from the 1990s, no matter how trivial the thing you're doing feels. You never know what's going to take off. Squarespace has tons of different tools, and if you're looking to open a business selling things online, they've got you covered for that. Squarespace can help you showcase what you're selling in a modern style. They include inventory management. There's no limit to how many items you want to sell. And even we use Squarespace. Both our linusmediagroup.com and LTX Expo websites were built quickly using Squarespace. If you ever get stuck building your website, they have a 24-7 support team that can help you out via live chat and email. So go check it out at squarespace.com slash ltt. If you use our link, you're going to get 10% off your first purchase. So thanks for watching, guys. If you enjoy these kinds of janky water cooling projects, you might enjoy the one where we water-cooled a laptop with Steve from Gamers Nexus, actually Sub-Zero alcohol-cooled a laptop, but you know, who's keeping track? We'll get that video linked down below for you.