Adata Reveals Additional Details About NeonStorm Solid State Drives With Built-in Liquid Cooling System Promising Up To 14GB/s Sequential Read Speeds And Up To 2M Random Read/Write Speeds At Computex 2023 Trade Show In Taipei I made it The PCIe 5.0 x4 drive appears to use Silicon Motion’s all-new platform, delivering unprecedented levels of performance.
Adata’s own self-contained liquid cooling system is probably the most important selling point of the upcoming NeonStorm drives, so it makes sense to start there. The cooling system uses high performance coolant, but it’s not LCS as we know it.
When the NeonStorm generates heat, the thermal gasket and metal heat spreader absorb the heat and maximize the contact area. This heat is transferred to a liquid reservoir where it is absorbed by a high performance coolant and cooled by an aluminum alloy tube surrounded by coolant. Meanwhile, the tube is cooled using two fans that blow air from one side to the other. According to Adata, this liquid-assisted cooling setup outperforms traditional fan cooling mechanisms and can significantly reduce SSD temperatures by an additional 20%. This extra cooling helps ensure consistently high performance for NeonStorm drives.
Adata’s NeonStorm SSD is configured to use Silicon Motion’s SM2508 controller, compliant with the NVMe 2.0 specification, delivering sequential read speeds up to 14GB/s and sequential write speeds up to 12GB/s, plus stunning random Promise read/write performance. 2 million IOPS is comparable to his enterprise grade SSD. As far as capacity is concerned, SM2508 based drives support 3D NAND up to 8TB. This is good enough for a client grade drive.
A key advantage of Adata’s NeonStorm coolers is that there is no potential point of failure, as the reservoir is built-in and fluid does not circulate from one system to another. Assuming the NeonStorm is of good build quality and the fans don’t fail, it will probably run flawlessly for years. Additionally, the cooling system doesn’t seem very expensive to manufacture and looks impressive.
Of course, fans make noise, so for now Adata also has to use an external cable to power the fan. Meanwhile, the company said it expects Silicon Motion to reduce the platform’s power consumption and allow fans to be fed from slots.
Adata’s NeonStorm is still a few months away, so there’s time for SSD makers to figure out ways to make their fans a little quieter and SMI to find ways to reduce the power consumption of their controllers.
