ATP Electronics: NVMe Flash Storage Solutions With Customizable Thermal Management

ATP Electronics, Inc. announced its NVMe flash storage solutions with customizable thermal management.

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Using both hardware and firmware components, the thermal management solution prevents overheating while ensuring optimal sustained performance, particularly for NVMe SSDs and modules that operate at blazing-fast speeds while installed in compact systems with little or no airflow.

N600Sc SSD

Thermal NVMe SSD offerings
The customizable ATP thermal management solution includes copper foil and fin-type heatsink options for N600Si/N600Sc M.2 2280 modules with up to 3.84TB and controller thermal pad for N600Si U.2 SSDs with up to 8TB capacities. They are recommended for applications requiring stable and sustained R/W performance at high temperatures.

Both come with Power Loss Protection (PLP), Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) ECC algorithm, RAID engine support, and end-to-end data path protection.

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Thermal management vs. traditional solution
Most SSDs are equipped with a thermal throttling mechanism, which cools the device by reducing the clock speed when a certain temperature is reached. Such mechanism, however, typically causes performance drops, thus making it difficult to sustain the performance.

The company’s thermal management solution combines firmware technologies and hardware options to meet customers’ unique thermal requirements for different use cases and scenarios, while ensuring optimal sustained performance even in extreme temperature shifts.

Close collaboration with the customers is a hallmark of the process. First, assessment of the system/mechanical and performance criteria is done. User applications and specs such as temperature, airflow, mechanical design, workload requirements, and other relevant factors are carefully considered.

Since air flow may vary depending on the fan and drive location, simulation tests are performed using a proprietary ATP-built mini chamber to recreate as closely as possible the thermal environments based on customers’ profile. Necessary adjustments are then made to ensure the most optimal solution to meet the requirements.

The thermal management solution is then customized based on the intensive assessment and simulation.

Solution consists of these components:

• Adaptive Thermal Control through the Thermal Throttling mechanism, which provides a delicate balance between performance and temperature instead of dramatic performance reduction.

• H/W heatsink solution. A variety of HW heatsink options (materials, dimensions, types) are available to match the mechanical constraints of each system design.

• Garbage Collection F/W Tuning. A periodic background refresh offsets the performance drop caused by the long garbage collection process.

By combining both hardware and firmware solutions, company’s NVMe SSDs with the customizable thermal management solution delivers higher sustained write performance compared with standard thermal throttling, which causes performance to drop drastically.

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