Patent — Management of Thermal Throttling in Storage Devices
+50 MBps throughput at 85–95 °C · USPTO US11508416B2
SSDs get hot. Hot SSDs slow down. We patented a way to keep them fast.
The problem
Consumer SSDs throttle aggressively at high temperatures (85–95 °C) — exactly the range encountered in cars, outdoor enclosures, and intensive sustained workloads. The drive protects itself, but throughput collapses, and users blame the drive.
The SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD line needed a smarter way to keep delivering throughput when the silicon was hot.
The approach
Co-invented and implemented a dynamic thermal/resource manager framework, granted as USPTO US11508416B2 — Management of Thermal Throttling in Data Storage Devices.
- Predictive throttling. Instead of reacting to a thermal event, the manager projects forward and pre-throttles non-critical paths to keep the critical path moving.
- Workload-aware reordering. Reorders queued requests so that thermal headroom is spent on the work users are waiting on.
- Write-window scheduling. Schedules large writes into windows where the thermal envelope is open, smoothing the user-visible throughput curve.
Stack
Embedded C++ · Python (test harness) · NVMe firmware
Outcomes
- +50 MBps sustained throughput at 85–95 °C on the SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD line.
- Granted as USPTO US11508416B2 in 2022.
What I learned
Predictive control beats reactive control — but only when you have a good thermal model. A lot of the patent work was in modeling enough of the drive's thermal physics to make the predictions trustworthy without burning silicon time on instrumentation.
Public
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