Heat Dissipation Analysis of M.2 NVMe Solid-State Drive in Vacuum

The use of solid-state drive (SSD) in storage devices has been rapidly growing due to the development of memory technology for high performance and high integration. Furthermore, the SSD is used in satellites, and the verification of the SSD operation is necessary in high vacuum condition without convection. Due to a small form factor and high performance in the vacuum, M.2 non-volatile memory express (NVMe) SSD is more susceptible to thermal failure. Recently, Samsung Electronics SSD has applied a metal heat spreader to facilitate the heat dissipation on the top surface of the controller package. For designing such a thermal solution in the SSD, thermal analysis of the SSD during the operation must be preceded. However, the M.2 NVMe SSD has multiple heat sources, such as the controller, the NAND flash memory packages and the dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), making it difficult to analyze a heat dissipation mechanism of the M.2 NVMe SSD. In this research, we employ thermocouples and a temperature sensor in the controller to obtain temperature of the M.2 NVMe SSD in various operating conditions. For heat transfer analysis, we develop the thermal simulation model of the M.2 SSD and the model was validated by comparing to temperature measurement results at various conditions. We analyzed the heat dissipation mechanism of the M.2 NVMe SSD in the high vacuum and atmospheric environment.