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Western Digital deploys heatsink on remodelled M.2 to tempt gamers

BlartVersenwaldIII
Linux

Give that heatsink some RGB LEDs and maybe we'll finally see a speed improvement worthy of gaming!

Snark aside of course, gaming is very rarely IO-limited and there's a sizeable market amongst the gaming crowd for functional/utilitarian designs with little in the way of bling. The heatsink is supposedly marginally useful, in that some NVMe devices throttle at high enough temperatures, but without TIM and the rest of it I think it's still of dubious utility. Thankfully it's available in a "naked" version for going in laptops or mobos where it won't fit (indeed, some mobos are coming with their own M2 heatsinks these days as well - but again that mostly seems to fall under the "heatsink ALL the things!" aesthetic).

The SN720 was seemingly a decent enough drive although apparently WD don't test it under linux and a couple of workarounds needed to be made in order to get it to boot IIRC;

https://community.wd.com/t/linux-support-for-wd-black-nvme-2018/225446

As someone who's using linux more and more I'm avoiding vendors without explicit Tux-friendliness; lots of SSD vendors seemingly only provide firmware updates via windows utils.

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