Question 1

Does it require a heat sink?

Accepted Answer

If you have good airflow through your case (like 2-3 unobstructed front fans and an unobstructed rear exhaust fan) you will be ok without a heatsink, especially if your motherboard comes with a heat spreading plate to screw down on top of the SSD.
If you don't have very good airflow in your case and you don't use a heatsink then it should still work, but you may experience some stuttering or otherwise slower average speeds from thermal throttling.

Question 2

Is this SSD power-efficient?

Accepted Answer

That depends on whether you mean efficiency relative to a workload or just power consumption over time.  The SN8100 is very efficient in terms of I/O throughput per watt.  However, like most PCIe Gen5 NVMe drives, it also consumes more power (and produces more waste heat) than comparable older drives.  For a sense of scale, the SN8100 is about 2 GB/s/W whereas the SN850X was roughly 1 GB/s/W.  Under a simulated gaming load, the SN8100 used 2.0 W whereas the SN850X used 1.3 W.

Question 3

Can I use this SSD for gaming and heavy workload applications?

Accepted Answer

Yes, this is one of the highest performing consumer SSDs as of October 2025.

Question 4

What's the durability of this SSD, can it handle intense tasks?

Accepted Answer

The SSD has an endurance of up to 2,400 TBW (terabytes written) for the 4TB model, making it capable of handling intense tasks such as gaming, caching, video editing, and AI workloads.

Question 5

How much data can I store on this SSD?

Accepted Answer

The SSD has a storage capacity of up to 4TB.

Question 6

Does this SSD come with a heatsink?

Accepted Answer

No, this SSD does not come with a heatsink.

Questions & Answers