Why is Intel keeping the overall physical dimensions of their Intel 670p Series 2 TB SSD a secret?

I recently submitted my order for a Minis Forum HX90 (specs) and being that I am looking to use it to replace my very hot Intel NUC that I had previously written about (it's back up to 100 C nominal now), and that I might also be offload all of the virtualisation duties as well from my Intel Core i7-6700K system and onto this new system instead. As such, I didn't know if said new system would support RAID0 with my two existing Samsung EVO 850 1 TB SATA 6 Gbps SSDs that are no longer currently deployed in a system, so I figured that I was going to get a 2 TB NVMe SSD just to be safe and I landed on this - an Intel 670p Series 2 TB NVMe 3.0 x4 SSD (specs).

Whilst browsing through YouTube, I stumbled my way upon a video where they were talking about NVMe SSD and putting heatsinks on them and how they would thermal throttle the performance if said NVMe SSD got too hot whilst it was being used/under load.

So, that got me thinking - should I start looking and seeing if I should be getting a NVMe SSD heatsink of my own for this drive?

So, I reached out to the customer support at Minis Forum (based out of Hong Kong, which is interesting because their first email back to me was written entirely in Traditional Chinese), so I asked them about a SSD heatsink (because some of the review units that they've sent to other tech YouTubers included a NVMe SSD with a heatsink pre-installed in the system) and they told me that the total height that the HX90 can take, INCLUDING the NVMe SSD is 7 mm.

So, ok. No problems, right? If I can find out what's the overall height of the Intel 670p Series 2 TB NVMe 3.0 x4 SSD, then I can figure out what's the maximum height of a heatsink the HX90 can accept, and then I can start to look into what are my purchasing options.

So, then I reached out to Intel's customer support, because of course, lo and behold, the overall height of the Intel 670p Series 2 TB NVMe 3.0 x4 SSD isn't listed on their spec page.

Huh. No overall physical dimensions listed on Intel's website.

So I reached out to Intel's customer service and asked them this basic question and also told them that it was because the manufacturer of the computer has told me what the maximum height of the combined SSD and heatsink can be so that I can properly size and purchase said heatsink. Their customer service rep said that they understand why I was asking for this information and would need to do further research on this topic/matter and that they would get back to me. Okay. Not a big deal.

Well earlier today, I got an email from said customer service rep stating quote:

Why would Intel keep the overall physical dimensions of their product under a NDA?

So, at this point, it seemed awfully suspicious.

I told them that I am not asking on behalf of the company where I work, and therefore; I have no idea if they have a signed NDA with Intel or not. (And frankly, that shouldn't matter because a customer should be able to ask for the overall physical dimensions of their product (and not the overall dimensions of the box/packaging that their product gets shipped in either).)

I then told them that I will just measure my drive when it arrives and that as such, I will not be signing a NDA in regards to this.

Well, about 3 hours later, my drive arrived.

So, for those that are interested in knowing, the overall physical dimensions of the Intel 670p Series 2 TB NVMe 3.0 x4 SSD are:

Overall length: 80.12 mm
Overall width: 22.05 mm
Overall height: 2.0525 mm (average of 2.09 mm, 2.06 mm, 1.97 mm, and 2.09 mm)

So, in case you're out trying to shop for a NVMe heatsink, and you're trying to use it for a small form factor (SFF) or ultra compact form factor (UCFF) build, now you know the height of the NVMe heatsink you can get.

The Part Of Computing That Nobody Ever Talks About

Whenever people talk about computers, whether it's CPUs, GPUs, RAM speeds, HDDs, SSDs, or networking, they will always put each of those components through its paces with some kind of test or benchmark and/or a suite of benchmarks.

At the component level, that's usually useful and good enough so that people can be informed about how one part compares to another part so that you can make informed, decisions about your current and/or future purchases and that's fine and dandy and all.

Today, I'm going to be talking about something that people in the computing and IT industry/world (especially for general public consumption) that is pretty much NEVER talked about as far as I can tell/see.

 

In the computing world, people will talk about how much data a CPU or a GPU is able to process, whether it's virtual machines, hyperscalers, databases, HPC/CAE applications, machine learning, etc.

 

In the storage subsystem world of HDDs and SSDs (or PMEM), they'll talk about a drive's performance in terms of sustained transfers rates (STRs) or the number of input/output operations per second (IOps) that a drive can deliver.

In the networking world, they'll either talk in millions of messages sent/received per second, the latency, or the raw bandwidth.

But notice that NONE of these ever talks about, for example, what it really means when you put it all together.

Take HPC/CAE for example. One simulation can generate terabytes (TBs) of data, if not more. A LOT more. As far as I can tell, NOBODY in the entire IT/computing industry talks about what do you do with all of that data and/or how to manage it that volume of data.

Moving the data around, organising it, making sure that it's consistent, especially when you have say upwards of 10 million files (I'm currently just shy of 7.5 million files (7,499,865 files to be exact as of the last scan, as of this writing).) - how nobody every talks about nor benchmarks what it's like to manage that much data.

For example, let's say that I want to update the user and the group that owns all of the files on a given system. That process, on my systems where one is hosting 2.8 million files and the other system is hosting close to 4 million files, can take anywhere between 40 minutes to an hour (each). And sometimes/usually, I will run those tasks overnight so that there are no other changes happening on the file system/server and even then it still takes between 40 minutes to an hour (each) just to do that. So upto 2 hours, JUST to update the user and the group that owns the files. Nothing else.

Why aren't people talking about the data processing speed of having to do just this kind of a basic, simple task?

Whenever people benchmark CPUs or drives, nobody bothers to talk about something like this.

Now you might argue that this isn't done very often, but that isn't the point.

The point is that there has been tremendous improvements that we've made to CPUs and GPUs and HDDs/SSDs and networking, but as a collective system, because nobody tests this, therefore; there aren't any improvements that people are making to actually make these operations run/go any faster.

And more broadly speaking, people will spend a LOT of time talking about, for example, how fast a CPU or GPU is, or how fast a drive is, or how fast networking is.

Nobody talks about how fast it is when you put it all together and you have to manage a (relatively large) volume of data.