New scratch disc

[FWG99]

I have liberated an M2 SSD from a damaged laptop (mechanical damage) and want to use it as a scratch disc in my PC which does have the M2 slots in the mother board so instalation is not a problem. Because this SSD came from a laptop it only had a very simple flat copper heat sink. My question to PS users is related to the heat potential. Does anyone know if this SSD usage as a scratch disc is likely to need a larger heat sink?

[D Fosse]

It should probably work. Laptops are generally throttled down to control temperatures, but that's mostly CPU and GPU.

When you buy an NVMe M.2 drive it comes without any form of heatsink. So you're already better off than if you bought the drive new.

Any heatsinks come with the motherboard. I have built two machines recently with M.2 drives, and both of those motherboards came with pretty simple M.2 heatsinks. Now that you mention it, I might try to open the box and check it by hand. Haven't seen any reason to do that so far.

[FWG99]

Thanks for the feed back. I have actually fitted it now with a very basic heat sink just to be safe. However other PS users may also be interested that the performance of PS has been dramatically improved using this "overkill" M.2 drive as a scratch disc. All my transitions etc which used to "stutter" a bit are now silky smooth and screen refresh is instant. Unbelievable improvement.

[D Fosse]

Thanks for reporting back. That's what I've been saying for a long time - the importance of the scratch disk is usually underrated.

With these new PCIe (aka NVMe) drives, the scratch disk is no longer a bottleneck, and having vast amounts of RAM installed is a lot less important than it used to be. Nominally RAM is still faster, but in practical use it's insignificant. You don't sit around waiting, that's the main thing.

I normally work with very large files, and more or less as an experiment I ran my home machine (NVMe scratch disk) with "only" 16GB of RAM for a year. It worked very well, and when I finally swapped it for a 32GB set, I honestly didn't notice any difference. Still don't.