Cooling for NVMe Base Duo?

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1

Hello,

I’ve purchased an NVMe Base Duo and I’m wondering if anyone has had any heat/cooling issues with the board and/or what your recommendations are to ensure proper cooling/heat dissipation with a Raspberry Pi 5. I have seen some mentions online about the potential for overheating when using 2 SSDs intensively. I will be using the official Raspberry Pi active cooler and I’m considering seeing if I can fit SSD-specific heatsinks on the 2 SSDs per this post ( NVME base, room to fit Samsung heatsink? ) involving the single-NVMe Base since I’m also using Samsung 990 SSDs. Has anyone else done something similar? Does anyone have experience using the Base Duo along with the RPi active cooler, and if so, does it provide sufficient cooling? I’m concerned that if I mount the Base Duo to the underside of the Pi, the active cooler may not be as effective as it would be if the board was mounted on top.

Also, I noticed from product images that when the SSDs are installed on the NVMe Base Duo, they are elevated a bit above the board with small standoffs, but I have not been able to find info on the dimensions. Does anyone know how much space there is between the installed SSDs and the board? Another thought I had for (at least partially) cooling the Base Duo would be to add a small heatsink to the PCIe packet switcher chip. But, since that chip appears to be in the middle of the Base Duo below where the SSDs sit, I have a feeling there is not enough space to fit a heatsink on top of it and below the SSDs. Just want to double check to see if that’s been tried before.

2

I would not worry about cooling NVMe SSDs that are connect to a Pi. You only have a single PCIe lane and this is shared by the two SSDs. The controllers on the SSDs will be mostly idle.

And if you really drive the SSDs to their limit with constant high bandwidth IO, you should better think about a different hardware solution.

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Yeah, I know I’m probably overthinking this. I’m putting this build together to experiment with so I’m not really using it for anything that I would need better hardware for. But since I don’t want to burn up the old SSDs I have while toying around I figured I’d see if anyone has experienced heat issues.

4

It is always better to ask first! Here is a chart, it does not show temperature, but it shows current of the Pi5+SSD. Most of this current is converted to heat one way or the other. In the middle part I exercised the SSD and as you can see it does not add much to the power-draw of the Pi5 in idle mode (start and end):

pi5+crucial+pimoroni-base
pi5+crucial+pimoroni-base1600×400 78.3 KB

So you have about 1W on top when the SSD is active (600mA idle → 800mA active is 200mA with 5V you have 1W).

If you put all of this in a tight case without ventilation, you will run into problems. But otherwise, you are fine. I use my “desktop” Pi5 in a case with SSD and active cooler, but the cooler only shortly runs when I turn the system on - probably it isn’t even necessary.

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5

That’s great info, thanks! I’ll probably play around with the setup to see what works best temp-wise but the power use does put my mind a bit more at ease.