Dealing with an uncomfortably hot SSD in my laptop.

I bought a Samsung 840 EVO 120GB SSD back in December and put it in the primary drive bay of my Lenovo Thinkpad T430.

The primary drive bay is located to the left of the trackpad, so if you could imagine having your hand hover over WASD as you game or how you would normally have your left hand positioned on the keyboard while typing, you'd be resting your palm directly on top of the the drive bay.

On idle this spot is nice and toasty, but when playing any game it becomes searing hot to the point where you will have your hand cooked and go numb if you continue to leave it there. The drive bay is a tight space with no air flow, but this still seems excessive. I mostly play World of Warcraft, which may be super intense for the SSD as it loads huge zones with essentially no loading screens, but I've tried playing on high and lowest settings and the dramatic rise in the SSD's temperature went unchanged.

The way I'm dealing with this right now is by busting out a USB keyboard if I plan on playing for more than 30 minutes, but this is annoying and I have some other ideas:

• Could I somehow limit the SSD's performance with the hope that it would prevent the SSD from reaching these high temperatures in the first place?
• Should I buy a HDD/SSD caddy for the Thinkpad's ultrabay (removable disc drive bay) to avoid this problem by simply relocating the SSD to where its heat output wouldn't affect me?

For that first point I was thinking of Samsung's Magician software. I remember installing it when I initially bought the SSD and I remember there were some settings related to having it optimized for performance or longevity or energy usage, something along those lines. There's a solid chance that switching to any of those modes might not help at all and instead kill the SSD's convenience in applications other than gaming. I also do most Windows 7/SSD optimization myself after formatting, and I recall it annoyingly interfering with battery/power settings, so I strongly dislike Magician.

For the second point I'm limited to ebay's line up of drive caddys, which may or may not include issues like poor fit with the actual ultrabay or lower performance for the SSD through shoddy connectors, but on the plus side this would give the SSD significantly more breathing room as it'd be placed away from the CPU + GPU (which are right above/ahead of it but experience no overheating) and it would be surrounded by some empty space ordinarily occupied by a much larger disc drive.

Essentially/ TL;DR I'm wondering is this ordinary behavior for an SSD in a laptop bay when being stressed with something significantly more intense than the occasional file transfer, or is it an issue with the SSD itself that should be dealt with through making use of its warranty?

 

See if your SSD have a temp sensor, what you think hot may not be that "hot".

 

Using HWMonitor it reads 52 C/125 F.

CPU is about 88 C/190 F if that matters.

 

52 degrees is a bit on the high side, but not even close to critical or dangerous temp
my intel msata ssd, which is notorious to overheat, often reach 70+ C. This IS worrying but I don't care. It still stays in my machine and running strong

 

this is from the samsung website.

what else is on the left hand side of your laptop. the heat could well be coming from the cpu or gpu unless its a faulty sensor on the drive.
have you cleaned the vents and fans out with compressed air yet?

 

You could, but you'd be limiting the throughput to SATA II speeds. Only you can decide how important this aspect is to you personally.

On a different note, 88 degrees C is quite high for a CPU and I suspect that those temps are affecting your SSD temps as well.

 

missed this post.

is that 88c at idle/brousing or during gaming. if you are not doing anything demanding on it at the time then yes you do have a problem as idle no matter what laptop should be in the region of 45-55c

you can find many more monitoring tools in my link below. hw monitor is good but try core temps and hwinfo64 and for a graph try msi afterburner.

 

I suggest you compare the temperature of the SSD for 3 conditions:

(i) After a period with the computer on idle
(ii) Peak temperature when running an SSD benchmark such as CrystalDiskMark
(iii) Peak temperature when running a CPU benchmark such as wPrime 1024.

These tests will show the worst case SSD temperature (OK if <70C) and reveal if the SSD temperature is influenced by the CPU.

John

 

55 c will in no way give you a searing sensation. What is your hard drive Bay made of? If it's metal, it could be conducting the heat from a nearby component such as your cpu or gpu.

Sent from a Galaxy far, far away

 

So its hot to the touch, get some sensor readings and let us know?

 

55C is fine.. As long as its less then 70C, your fine...

 

Anything over 30C will throttle most newer SSD's.

In this case, new=garbage. So much for fast, quiet and 'no' heat... sigh.

 

Do you have evidence for this low temperature threshold?

I've not seen any performance slowdown due to temperature with SSDs running well above 30C (but below 55C).

John

 

My evidence is simply using an SSD in one of my notebooks (usually, i7 QC, 16GB RAM) and moving it to a desktop with a lower end platform (and much better airflow) and miraculously, all the 'stutters' are gone (same O/S, Intel platform identical or more RAM, and same software setup; ~100GB worth).

A more objective link starts here in the following thread:

See:
Read speeds dropping dramatically on older files; benchmarks needed to confirm affected SSDs - Page 10


Even though the testing is limited from 30C and above.


To be precise: the slowdown when an SSD is 'warm' is not a general slowdown, rather, it shows up (to me) as stuttering of the drive because (I think) the bursts needed are not allowed by the firmware.


Furthermore, in the exact same systems and the exact same configurations (hardware, O/S and Programs), any older SSD without the temp sensor does not exhibit these 'symptoms'. But yeah; I can tell they are slower than current SSD's.