Power consumption of U.2 NVMe drives

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lunadesign

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Aug 7, 2013
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I'm looking to move from SATA SSDs to U.2 NVMe SSDs and am curious about the power consumption (and cooling).

For example, Intel specs their P4510 4TB NVMe drive at 5W idle / 14W active.

In comparison, Intel specs their S4610 3.84TB SATA drive at 1.1W idle / 3.7W active.

I totally get that NVMe is going use more power run hotter since it's pushing data faster. However, I'm curious what people are seeing in the real world.

What should I expect if an NVMe drive sees light usage most of the time with occasional bursts of heavy activity? IE, does a drive like the P4510 jump up to 14W for every short read or write? Or does it only get to that level when it's being heavily taxed with tons of concurrent read & write operations?

Thanks!
 

T_Minus

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Feb 15, 2015
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It uses that when it's writing. And it will use that.
14w isn't bad, there are higher performance drives (and older generation nvme) that will use 25w and those are HOT, you need active cooling.

I have the P4500 in my desktop behind my intake fan, never a heat issue and works fine but I don't have it as my "OS" drive or "App" drive, just for storage so minimal usage. But they will get warm to the touch or hot if writing a lot.
 

lunadesign

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Good to know....what about reading?

And in the "small amount of writes" case, do you get the sense the spike to 14W is just long enough to get the writes done or does it hang around in high power mode for a while anticipating more writes?

Thanks!
 

T_Minus

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Normal writes won't jump to 14w think hammering it with as much writing as it can do :D
 

T_Minus

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Got it. And what about read operations? Are those less taxing than writes?
Are you reading GBs for hours on end or reading a 2MB file?

Everyday usage it wasn't noticeable... for non-stop reads it does use power but not full rated power. I don't recall beyond that and sorry it's a vague reply :/
 

lunadesign

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Are you reading GBs for hours on end or reading a 2MB file?

Everyday usage it wasn't noticeable... for non-stop reads it does use power but not full rated power. I don't recall beyond that and sorry it's a vague reply :/
I'd say mostly in-between. A mix of small and big files with some occasional large files but rarely longer than an hour.

I think your answer gives me a decent idea of what to expect. Thanks!

If anyone else has any experiences, I'd love to hear them.
 

BlueFox

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If you need to fit within a certain power limit due to cooling, you can set the maximum power usage for Intel SSDs using their official tools.

I wouldn't worry about it too much otherwise though. I have a P4600 in an ITX desktop and have never had any issues with heat.
 

lunadesign

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If you need to fit within a certain power limit due to cooling, you can set the maximum power usage for Intel SSDs using their official tools.

I wouldn't worry about it too much otherwise though. I have a P4600 in an ITX desktop and have never had any issues with heat.
Really? Is that a firmware level setting or an OS level setting? This would be for a TrueNAS rig.
 

BlueFox

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Really? Is that a firmware level setting or an OS level setting? This would be for a TrueNAS rig.
I think it's firmware level, but you'd want to confirm. You would need to set it under Windows or Linux first using the ISDCT utility (PowerGovernorMode setting) as I don't believe it is supported under FreeBSD.
 

EffrafaxOfWug

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Feb 12, 2015
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It's not explained especially well by the isdct util itself but intel have a page on it here indicating what the various power levels do.


They mention on the above page that setting power modes is also possible with the nvme command line (not sure if this exists in BSD either?) but I'm not sure what the sub-command is for that.
 
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evilpaul

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Oct 15, 2020
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I picked up two 280GB Optane 900Ps and was curious/concerned about how warm they'd run. It seems a fair bit cooler than their AIC bigger brother when doing the same Chia plotting for 24 hours. Peak temp was 12C lower, although the AIC is beneath an idle 2080 Ti.

Will U.2 drives run off just two PCIe lanes, btw?
 

NateS

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I picked up two 280GB Optane 900Ps and was curious/concerned about how warm they'd run. It seems a fair bit cooler than their AIC bigger brother when doing the same Chia plotting for 24 hours. Peak temp was 12C lower, although the AIC is beneath an idle 2080 Ti.
That's definitely due to the different SKUs, your 2080Ti, and possible airflow differences in the different parts of your case. For same sized drives sitting in open air without fans, the U.2 definitely runs hotter. The AIC can reasonably be run passively, but I'd recommend getting some airflow on the U.2 ones. And of course, the bigger drives consume more power, and thus put out more heat.

Will U.2 drives run off just two PCIe lanes, btw?
Yes. At least the Optanes will; I can't speak for every NVMe ever. Most of them should though, since dual port NVMe is a thing, and if you stick a single port drive in a dual port host, it'll only get 2 PCIe lanes, so most enterprise drives should be designed to be compatible with that.

Standard disclaimer: I work at Intel on Optane, but my posts should not be considered official statements from Intel, and all opinions are my own. I'm happy to answer questions about these drives though because I know them very thoroughly.
 
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NateS

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If you need to fit within a certain power limit due to cooling, you can set the maximum power usage for Intel SSDs using their official tools.
Keep in mind that you're giving up some performance if you do this. If the workload needs more power than the limit you've set, it'll throttle traffic to stay under that limit. In certain situations it can be useful, but other times it just makes more sense to buy a lower power, lower performance drive in the first place.

I wouldn't worry about it too much otherwise though. I have a P4600 in an ITX desktop and have never had any issues with heat.
I imagine you're not hitting it hard with a write-intensive workload then. On Nand drives, writes take much more power than reads, and they have to be designed to handle an all-write workload, so if you're doing mostly reads, you won't generally have any thermal problems. OTOH, if you decide to start plotting Chia on this drive, I'd recommend putting a fan on it to avoid thermal throttling.

Really? Is that a firmware level setting or an OS level setting? This would be for a TrueNAS rig.
Firmware level.