Frore Airjet SSD cooling demo — actively cooled drive offers double the sustained performance

The Frore Systems AirJet solid-state cooling technology looks extremely promising, as the company's demonstrations show. Later this year more people will be able to experience it themselves, as it is coming to external SSDs from a well-known manufacturer, the company revealed at Computex.

To demonstrate the potential of its AirJet technology for solid-state drives, Frore took two identical Sabrent 8TB SSDs and installed them into two identical Orico external SSD enclosures, and then installed a pair of AirJet Mini cooling devices into one of the enclosures. The result was quite inspiring. With only passive cooling, the regular drive got to 62°C and the enclosure became extremely hot. However, in the modified enclosure with two AirJet Minis the drive temperature was only 42°C and the chassis became warm, but not hot.

The passively cooled drive also throttled heavily, which is why its sustainable performance was 1,320 MB/s, which is not high for this model. The drive cooled using Frore's AirJet Minis could sustainably read and write data at 3,016 MB/s, which is over two times better than the passively cooled one.

With such a huge difference both for temperature and performance, it is not surprising why a well-known maker of SSDs decided to use Frore's AirJets for upcoming products. According to Sue Ryan, a representative for Frore, this forthcoming product will not only deliver very high performance, but will also have firmware/controller features typically not activated on external SSDs due to overheating concerns. For Frore, this is an important design win as external drives tend to be sold in significant quantities.

Given the advantages of Frore's AirJets, an avid DIY reader might ask whether it will be possible to get an AirJet cooler in retail and then install it on any SSD with your own hands. Unfortunately, this is not going to happen for now as the company focuses on selling its AirJet solid-state cooling systems to large manufacturers. Selling thousands or millions of units to a single customer is a lot easier for the company than going after the retail market.