Increasing SSD Power and Efficiency with Liquid Cooling

Every SSD must pay a static power penalty just for turning on and being prepared to do work.  This penalty is due to silicon leakage, transistors switching without transferring data and voltage regulation losses among other sources.  Therefore, the most power-efficient thing an SSD can do is to do as much work as possible.  Since dynamic power efficiency scales linearly with the amount of work a drive does, the best thing for a drive to do is draw as much power as necessary to do as much meaningful work as possible.  This discussion will explore the trend of enterprise SSDs increasing power draw beyond the traditional 25W that has long been considered a maximum for many form factors to maximize power efficiency. 

A major component to power efficiency is adequate cooling of a drive.  Silicon leakage current increases exponentially with rising temperature so it is imperative that a drive’s component temperature remain as cool as possible.   The need for drives to dissipate more power while remaining cooler necessitates more aggressive, liquid cooling solutions for the datacenter.  This discussion will present design choices needed to adequately cool drives which go beyond typical 25W power draw and their benefits.