Can airflow fix the read speed drops on Samsung 9100 PRO?
It's honestly ridiculous that a top-tier 8TB drive can be crippled by heat. Halfway through a session, the loading speeds felt like I was back on a mechanical HDD. The PCIe 5.0 interface on the Samsung 9100 PRO hits over 85℃ under load, triggering a hardware thermal throttle that drops sequential reads from 12000MB/s to a pathetic 2000MB/s. I tried lowering the power plan in Windows, which dropped the temp by 5℃ but added 10 seconds to my load times—a completely useless trade-off. I ended up redesigning my case airflow and mounting a tiny 40mm fan directly over the M.2 heatsink, then enabled the lightweight power mode in Samsung Magician. HWInfo shows temps finally stabilizing between 62-68℃, and the read speeds stopped crashing. I had some annoying vibration noise at first because the cables were too long, but some zip ties fixed it. Power draw is now 8-12W, and performance is back to peak. The logs show the throttle is gone, with fan speeds at 1400-1600RPM.
