Adata's XPG Mars 970 Storm SSD Hits Blazing Speeds With Hybrid Liquid Cooling
We're venturing into territory of unprecedented consumer storage speeds as solid state drive (SSD) makers push the limits of the PCI Express 5.0 bus. The biggest challenge is keeping temps in check (though that's not the only challenge), especially for sustained throughput. Facing that challenge head on, Adata is at CES showing off its XPG 970 Mars Storm SSD with a hybrid liquid cooler attached.
To be clear, we're not really at a point where liquid cooling your storage drive is truly necessary. There could be potential benefits though. Not counting add-in card (AIC) solutions, today's NVMe drives utilize four lanes of PCIe traffic. For a PCIe 5.0 drive, that translates into around 15.75GB/s of maximum theoretical bandwidth, which doesn't take into consideration overhead and other factors that prevent drives from actually hitting the max speed available.
They're coming close, though, just as we saw happen with PCIe 4.0 SSDs. As drives continue to get faster, drive makers are playing around with cooling solutions to support top speeds. Enter Adata's XPG Mars 970 Storm, which is rated to deliver up to 14,000MB/s (14GB/s) of sequential read performance and up to 12,000MB/s (12GB/s) of sequential write performance.
According to Adata, the drive's "patented dual air/liquid cooling system" increases heat dissipation efficiency by 25%, for a big cooling boost.
The render shared by Adata shows an air bubble, which makes it look a little bit like a level. Whether it will actually have any air bubbles when it ships remains to be seen. Either way, it consists of a liquid-filled cylinder which, according to TechPowerUp's visit to Adata's booth at CES 2025, works in conjunction with a pair of 25mm fans.
Adata tapped Silicon Motion for the controller hardware—the drive utilizes Silicon Motion's SM2508 controller that's built on TSMC's 6-nanometer manufacturing process. Apparently the drive will be offered in capacities up to 8TB. There's no mention of price or availability yet.
Regardless of pricing, you're not going to squeeze this thing into your PlayStation 5 console, not with the hybrid liquid cooler attached. Adata's XPG Mars 970 Storm is bound for PCs only, and even then, you'll have to make sure your system has the space to accommodate a tall cooler. For those that do, it will be interesting to see what kind of real world benefits this might have versus traditional cooling solutions.
