Originally Posted by
lhrsfo
The other advantage of SSDs in a laptop is that there's no need for a fan, which makes it quiet.
Originally Posted by
tmiw
That's more a function of the CPU and/or GPU in the machine. There are definitely laptops with SSDs that still have fans.
Originally Posted by
garykung
Seriously - the fan is intended to cool down the laptops by emitting hot air.
Generally, to specifically move air over the radiator of a heat sink connected to the CPU (and GPU, if any) or a pair one for each (or occasionally a pair of fans/radiators at the ends of one big heat sink). I haven't seen a laptop with a non-heat-sink connected fan since the 1990s.
While I don't comment whether SSDs eliminate the need of a fan, a laptop without the fan may not last as long as others, as hot air can melt down solders and total the laptop.
An adequately designed laptop with passive cooling should be much more reliable than a laptop with one or more fans. As a moving part (and often one binned for low cost, not reliability), fans are often the first thing to go in a laptop. Moreover the air path is usually such that dust and hair get caught between the fan and the radiator, limiting airflow, and on many laptops it's hard to clean. Modern machines have thermal shutdowns which will kick in LONG before solder melts or there's an immediate/acute electronic failure, but a laptop that overheats and shuts down is still hardly very useful.
There is a risk of long-term thermal stress to components if the machine is running near its limits, which is more likely in a machine with poorly designed or passive cooling, but I don't know that anyone's quantified it for laptops.
As for SSDs eliminating the need for a fan, the hottest laptop-style SSD I know of has a rated maximum draw of 12 watts, and while there are plenty of machines these days do put a heat spreader on the SSD to keep individual components (usually the controller) from overheating I've never seen anyone put a fan to give one airflow.
For contrast, CPUs in full power laptops have a TDP (thermal design power -- not directly comparable to rated maximum current draw but correlated as it's a measure of the output heat a system using them should be able to tolerate) of 35 or 45W (and there have been 55W) and at typical laptop gaming GPU these days pulls 55W (with serious high end ones up over 100W) and the more typical U-series low-power CPUs in most systems these days are rated for a 15W TDP. I think I've seen some passively cooled laptops with 15W CPUs, but most passively cooled systems tend to use a reduced wattage CPU (10W or smaller) -- usually the 4.5W "Core M" cpus as used in the Macbook 12" (probably the highest-profile fanless system.)