Any solution for overheating storage expansion cards?
I have 3 250GB storage expansion cards.
If I don't write anything to them they are mostly fine and read speed is reasonable, a.k.a. better than HDD speed. If I write anything, however, the cards will very quickly overheat and throttle to the point they are much slower than a spinning disk.
A sequential copy of a 50GB file to the card would start at ~300MB/s, drop to 150MB/s seconds later, and 15-20MB/s after 1-2 minutes. At this point the card becomes slower than a spinning HDD across a USB 2.0 cable. The bad performance under throttling also makes running windows installation a pain & gives sporadic problems running linux distros.
I am aware FW tried to fix the problem by adding a thermal pad. I have opened the card assembly and verified that the thermal pad is there. And my room's ambient temperature is not particularly hot - just around 25C. This behavior is shared across multiple different host machines, so it's not like the FW mainboard conducted too much heat into the card.
Does anyone have the same problem & how do you deal with it?
Some ideas:
- I noticed only half of the NAND is padded with thermal pad because the exposed metal on the card's casing does not extend below the other half.
- The controller side has no thermal pad and facing towards plastic casing. If the drop in performance is from controller overheating, maybe I can try to swap the USB-A card's metal lid onto the 250GB and add a thermal pad there?