Can active cooling stop Samsung 9100 PRO 8TB from overheating?
The Samsung 9100 PRO is an absolute furnace. PCIe 5.0 is fast, sure, but this thing gets hot enough to fry an egg. While playing Horizon Online, the drive hit the 85℃ thermal limit and just vanished from the system—I almost lost it. I tried cranking my case fans to max, but it sounded like a jet engine and only dropped the temp by 3 degrees, which was a total waste of time. I finally bought an active M.2 cooler with a dedicated fan and forced the PCIe link to Gen4 in the BIOS to kill the power draw. HWInfo showed temps plummet from 85℃ down to 52-60℃, and the drive hasn't dropped once since. I had a scare where the cooler cable blocked my GPU fan, making the GPU overheat, but a bit of cable management fixed that. Read/write speeds are still 6000-7000MB/s; I lost a bit of peak speed, but it's rock steady now. Logs show fan speeds staying between 1400-1600RPM.
