According to a recent product notice,Intel has added a heatsink to its Optane SSD 905P SSDs. The company first released the M.2 variant of its speedy Intel Optane 905P SSD a year ago, but a handful of concerns were raised about its ability to dissipate heat. This was only a natural response from the market because the other forms of Intel Optane 905P SSDs, such as the U.2-connected model and the more-common PCIe add-in-card, all had metal heatsinks. Yet the M.2 model lacked this particular feature when it came out roughly one year ago.

(Image credit: Intel)

At the time, third-party cooler-maker EKWB introduced a passive heatsink that you could add on to the SSD to handle cooling. This was great, except that it cost an additional $20 plus shipping – and a lot of people weren’t amused by the apparent necessity for a third-party cooler, or the hassle of the extra effort. Consequently, we doubt many buyers opted to take this route.

(Image credit: Intel)

It appears that Intel has listened to those concerns. It might have taken almost a year, but the chipmaker has come out with its own cooling solution for the 380GB Optane 905P M.2 SSD. It consists of an Optane-branded metal plate for each side of the unit.

Intel Optane SSD 905P M.2 SSD Capacity (GB) 22x110mm, M.2, 380GB Memory Media Intel 3D XPoint Memory Media Sustained Sequential Read/Write 3 Up to 2,700 / 2,200 MB/s Random 4KB Random Read/Write 3 Up to 575,000 / 550,000 IOPS Read/Write Latency <10 µs / < 11 µs Interface PCIe 3.0 X 4, NVMe Form Factors, Height, and Weight M.2 22mm / 110mm / 3.88mm / up to 13 grams Life Expectancy 1.6 million hours Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) Lifetime Endurance 4 10 Drive Writes per Day (DWPD) Power Consumption Typical Active Sequential Read: 6.5W / Active Write: 11.7W / Idle: 2.7W Operating Temperature 5 0° C to 85° C

The cooling solution will be shipped with all new units of the Intel Optane 905P M.2 SSD, although some current inventory might still ship without it. As noted by Computerbase, if you already own one of these SSDs, you can request a free heatsink at www.intel.com/ssdmodulesupport.