I don't know whether to be afraid or impressed by this PCIe 5.0 SSD with a tiny liquid cooler attached

MSI's new liquid-cooled PCIe 5.0 SSD at CES 2024.

(Image credit: Future)

Has SSD cooling gone too far? Are PCIe 5.0 speeds worth it? These are the questions to wrestle with as you stare down an SSD with its own dedicated liquid cooler.

The drive in question is MSI's Spatium M580 PCIe 5.0 NVMe M.2 2TB Frozr Liquid, which comes with its very own pint-sized water cooler, radiator, and blower fan. That's to help deal with the extra heat this PCIe 5.0 drive throws out when running up to 14,000MB/s read/12,000MB/s write—blisteringly quick, but at what cost?

The compact radiator is a little bit adorable, sure, but there's something rather terrifying about the idea of an SSD that requires so much cooling.

MSI's Spatium cooler lineup first caught my attention over at Computex. These air-cooled SSDs were hard to miss—they're absolutely huge. Yet MSI has gone above and beyond with its latest addition at its CES 2024 booth.

"The compact water pump is a powerhouse that defies its small size with remarkable effectiveness, seamlessly providing uncompromising cooling capabilities within a confined build," says MSI on a promotional sign at the event. That's language you'd usually expect to see with a new graphics card shroud.

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If you want flawless, consistent transfer performance from a PCIe 5.0 SSD, you do need to think about how well you're cooling it. I'm sure this little liquid-cooled drive is well up there for extended file transfer performance, too. Though for most PC gamers, a PCIe 4.0 drive and a regular-sized heatsink will do just fine.

Though we should come to expect more of this sort of thing. The further silicon is pushed, the more heat is generated. This will continue to happen until we can find something to replace silicon altogether, but finding a suitable replacement for silicon isn't an easy task.

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PC Gamer's CES 2024 coverage is being published in association with Asus Republic of Gamers.

Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog, before graduating into breaking things professionally at PCGamesN. Now he's managing editor of the hardware team at PC Gamer, and you'll usually find him testing the latest components or building a gaming PC.