I’ve got the same performance as @DannyT – I’m about to order another 1TB card b/c I’d like it for other options. I’m OK if the one I have throttles at 16GiB because I could just relegate it to doing stuff like backup – but I’d like my drive I use for OSes to be more reliable. Hopefully the new one will be. I can use a Samsung T7, but I like having it inside my device so to speak.
We’re working with our suppliers for the flash storage and module integration on the 1TB Expansion Card on this. We have found that there is a small amount of unit-to-unit variation along with variability in performance from ambient temperature, but the biggest impact on throttling is the length of sustained sequential write. Sustained read and mixed or random read/write will generally not result in throttling, but sustained write will.
The good news is that we have found that applying a thermal pad from the flash package to the aluminum housing of the card substantially lengthens the write time before throttling. We’re working with our suppliers to qualify a new thermal pad and introduce this into new production soon, and we’ll also send out thermal pads and instructions on how to install them to anyone with a current 1TB Expansion Card who is interested in it once we have thermal pads available. For anyone who wants to experiment in the meantime, something like this is roughly what we’ll be using: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/t-global-technology/TG-A1250-10-10-1-5/11617050
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Ah yes, very interested!
Will it be worth adding a thermal pad to a 250GB card? I was gonna install my gaming OS there.
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We’re going to apply a pad to the 250GB card as well in new production, but in general it is harder to make that flash stack throttle.
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I also have the 1TB card. It overheats and slows down to ~50MB/sec, then down to 1MB/sec. I’m not testing via CrystalDisk, but just two real world separate copies of 369GB small/med/large files. The first was plugged into another laptop first to copy my OneDrive files to the Framework, the other after I reformatted the 1TB card with NTFS and then repeated the copy on the Framework to see of that would make a difference. There was a Framework Laptop review somewhere I read that wrote about the same experience. Update: Just saw the new Guide posting about this).
If anyone with an expansion card is wondering if this thermal pad thing works… I refer you to the following…
BEFORE
AFTER
Very happy, can’t wait to play some more Cyberpunk on my framework later!
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I also did a 64Gib test and it didn’t throttle for that entire test either. Highest the temp got was 62… THAT’S A 10 DEGREE IMPROVEMENT just with a little thermal pad! … Now I am certain that if I try to install another 100GB game on that drive that it will eventually throttle but how often do I do that?
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Glad to hear that! Here’s a quick test I did here as well running 5x64GB sequential writes. 70C is where throttling would begin to occur. It’s still possibly the case depending on your ambient temperature that if you’re doing multi-hundred-GB writes, that you can cause the card to throttle, but under normal usage it shouldn’t.
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I bought and installed the thermal pad as described and it has improved. I’m seeing 66C max temp now vs. 72C before. It still gets hot enough to throttle down to 40-50MB/s though after 40-50GB of writes. I can live with that for normal use since it isn’t dropping to 1MB/s now, but still a little disappointing. Thanks for the quick countermeasure to get this improvement!
I’m on my second 1TB expansion card now and it was operating fine when I first got it and tested it when blank. However, once I started filling it the heat and throttling started. At half full (500GB) it is almost unusable again.
Are there any other places where I can purchase that thermal pad? Would thermal tape also work? Are the newest 1TB modules coming with the thermal pad installed?
@Shawn_Lewis - there’s a link to buy the thermal pad (from digikey iirc) in the guide that Nirav provided farther up in this thread.
@lbkNhubert, I can’t purchase from DigiKey. A salesperson there and I had a falling out some years ago and now they take my orders. Basically, they are a … company. Are there any other places I can buy this or an alternative type?
@Shawn_Lewis - ah, I missed the word “other”…reading is fundamental.
Google (well, duckduckgo) had this
You may be able to buy one and trim it down. I had a couple left over from external NVME cases and just used them.
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I do have pyrolytic graphite sheets. 
That happens on occasion. If you can, just change the name you use to set up an account.
We had to do that one time until the employee blocking us got themselves fired finally after other complaints.
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