ADATA introduced a truly impressive Gen5 SSD at Computex, the first in the liquid cooling market and a giant sink.

Gen5 SSDs continue to hit the market and offer another leap in performance. This increase in speed in a format as small as M.2 increased the temperature of the drives compared to previous generations. which requires refrigerationat least for the passive coolers that we find in the units themselves or those that are part of most motherboards of the latest generation.

Some manufacturers install active cooling and corresponding fans. Models like the SPATIUM M570 PRO, also presented at the Taiwan fair and the fastest to date with data transfers over 14 Gbytes per second, are examples of these designs, as they include their own chassis, cooler and large fan.

Fans are effective, but they can be quite noisy and they end up being annoying. And some designs will need additional power. It’s not ideal, but it looks like they will eventually be required when looking for the best performance. Tests with Gen5 SSDs such as the Crucial T700 have shown a dramatic drop in performance when they are not properly cooled, and other manufacturers are looking for a solution for their entire storage pool.

Liquid-cooled Gen5 SSD

ADATA took the bull by the horns and created a system liquid cooling to cool your hard drives, the first of its kind. Codenamed ‘NeonStorm’, its design assumes a transparent case that absorbs heat through the coolant. An aluminum alloy tube inside efficiently transfers heat between air and liquid, while two fans on each side dissipate the heat.

All these components are placed on a special heatsink and plate that minimizes thermal resistance. The company claims it outperforms traditional coolers by 20 percent, which is enough to consistently deliver the promised performance of more than 14GB/s sequential read and 12GB/s write.

The design is impressive and its huge size, but it suggests that the top of the range hard drives will be looking for this type of cooling system. The ADATA model uses the SM2508 controller, Silicon Motion compatible with NVMe 2.0. The manufacturer will launch it on the market with storage capacities of up to 8 Tbytes. We don’t know the release date or the price.