Phison Says A Fix Is Incoming For Thermal Shutdown Issue Affecting PCIe 5.0 SSDs
Indeed, as revealed in recent SSD reviews, Phison's E26 controller for PCIe 5.0 solid-state drives requires cooling of some sort, and while there are drives using the chip that are sold without a heatsink, you're intended to place them under a motherboard heatsink or active cooler of your own devising. You can't run them without a heatsink because they will overheat and shut down or suffer from errors, just like a CPU or GPU.
Even when the drive is running without a heatsink, though, it shouldn't go into thermal shutdown so easily. Modern CPUs can actually be run without a heatsink—albeit with hilariously-poor performance—and an SSD controller shouldn't be putting out that much heat. Phison agrees, because it has announced that it is going to release a firmware update that adjusts the thermal throttle curve to avoid these issues.
The company announced this in a comment to Tom's Hardware, where it said that its engineers have actually already completed the process of creating the firmware, but that it's up to its partners to validate and release the modified ROM. Remember, you don't own a Phison SSD, but instead one from ADATA, Corsair, Gigabyte, et al. Because of that validation process, it's likely to be a little bit before you can get the fixed firmware.
Still, it's not completely unreasonable for someone to buy a new SSD, rip open the box, and install it in their system without realizing that they need cooling that isn't included. Hopefully this firmware update prevents data loss for those users may not read disclaimers.
