Toshiba OCZ VX500 512GB SSD Review

Toshiba OCZ VX500 SSD Temperatures

Temperatures have always played a critical role on storage drives and in recent years we’ve seen it cause drives to fail prematurely and we’ve even seen some SSD performance results change for the worse if components were too hot or too cold. Since temperature is an important thing to keep an eye on we check the idle and load temperatures on all of the drives that we review. To get the idle temperature results we leave the drive sitting on an open air test bench in a room that is 19C. For the load numbers we use IOMeter to write 128KB to the drive sequentially for 20 minutes and record the top temperature.

When we took the VX500 drive apart we found that thermal pads were placed on the controller and each 15nm MLC NAND package to help dissipate heat to the metal enclosure. This drive uses 5mW in DevSLP supporting systems, 125mW at idle and tops out at 3.4W when active. Hopefully we’ll be looking at some pretty good thermal numbers as a result!

The Toshiba OCZ VX500 512GB drive had an idle temperature of 24-25C and we found that it topped out at 39C after doing over 500GB of straight 128KB sequential writes across the entire drive with IOMeter. That’s beyond the norm, so we stopped paying attention to the temps as 99.9% of people aren’t going to be pounding a mainstream consumer SSD that hard! It’s one thing to copy a movie folder that is 100GB in size versus filling an entire drive up all at once.

Let’s wrap this up!