My SSD runs 10C warmer at idle than my platter drive.

At idle in Windows 7 64 bit on a Gateway P7805u laptop my Kingston SSDnow V series 64gb sits at 50-51 Celsius and my Hitachi 7200rpm Travelstar at 40-41C. The ambient temp in the room is about 50F, a nice cool room.

SSD is OS/boot drive and the Hitachi is my game/data drive.

Is this a normal idle temp sitting at the Windows desktop? It never goes below 50C. I've always read that SSD hard drives run nice and cool. I'm just a little concerned about it.

I did a Google search and a search here but couldn't find anything definitive. What do your SSD's idle at?

Thanks.

 

It could be that the temp sensor on your Kingston drive has a min temp of 50 degrees. This is pretty common on PC temp sensors. They have a min temp reading and will not register unless their temp really goes above that min. This is a fail-safe design feature. If a temp sensor ever reports a temp lower than it's design minimum, that is called a fail-low condition, one that is easily detectable by the appropriate monitoring software.

On the other paw, consumer-grade flash memory always runs hot.

Without knowing the real specs of the drive temp sensors AND having an independent way to read the temps (a completely different temp sensor or an IR thermometer), there is no real way to tell what might be normal for this drive.

 

OK, thank you. Maybe I will stick a temp probe from my fluke on it and compare the readings. That's a good idea.

 

If these are both installed at the same time in the same laptop, it is easily explained. The temperature the devices read means they reached that temperature, but says nothing as to how they reached that temperature. The SSD could simply be in a warmer spot in your laptop. I know right now, depending on where I put my hand on my laptop, I feel different temperatures, and most of the heat is coming from the processor and chipset.

Also if you want to test newsposter's theory you could check the temperatures as soon as you boot up after leaving the computer off for hours.

 

50C isn't that bad. Furthermore, SSDs can handle heat better than mechanical hard drives so you shouldn't have too much to worry about.

 

OK, did a few tests.

First, I swapped the drives in their bays and temperatures remained the same. They're not too far apart but if it was a hardware location issues I probably would have seen some difference. The hard drives on this unit are under the palm rest. The hot stuff, GPU, CPU, etc. are towards the rear of the laptop underneath the media bay. Nothing too hot near the drives.

Both drives get toasty warm to the touch, I would call them hot.

I put the SSD in an external USB housing and booted to it from there, completely apart from the laptop. No temp readings this way but it did get hot feeling again.

Cold boot temp, when I get into Windows, is 46C.

My HDD activity lamp is constantly flashing. Something is using these drives, reading and writing, to get these temps up. I do know they are still within their safe operating range but if something is constantly working my drives I would like to know what it is.

The maximum temp I've seen, running CrystalDisk benchmark, was 58C.

Something just seems fishy to me. Maybe it's normal though, I don't really know what to think.

 

You could restore it. Then check temps. If the temps are lower, you might of had a virus or other malicious software on your computer. Or maybe it is just some badly written software.

 

Just put it in and it is a fresh windows install. Does your HDD light flicker constantly in Windows 7? I mean it isn't steady but every few moments it blinks off and on a little bit and then pauses. I think this thing just idles hot for some reason. I have an email into Kingston to see if it's normal.

 

Bear in mind that the thing is basically a huge hunk of silicon chips, it makes sense that it would be hot, even USB memory sticks get hot if you stress them enough.

 

No, I don't have on either but I can assure you that drives run hot in the Gateways..bad cross flow ventilation.

Judging from your specs, I would say that your good. I find that Everest is able to read temps and smart data on an external USB port.

Specifications
Capacity 2 — 30 GB, 64 GB, 128 GB
Storage Temperatures — -40° C to 85° C
Operating temperatures — 0° C to 70° C
Vibration Operating — 2.17 G Peak (7–800Hz)
Vibration Non-Operation — 20 G Peak (20–2000Hz)
Sequential Speed 3 —
30 GB - up to 180 MB/sec. read, 50 MB/sec write
64 GB – up to 200MB/sec. read; 110MB/sec. write
128 GB – up to 200MB/sec. read; 160MB/sec. write
PCMARK® Vantage Advanced HDD Suite Score 4 —
30 GB - 18,900
64 GB – 21,317
128 GB – 20,177
Power Specs —
Active: 1.7 - 5.2 W (TYP)
Sleep: 0.05 - 0.7 W (TYP)
Life expectancy — 1 million hours mean time before failure, 64 GB/128 GB
500,000 hours mean time before failure, 30 GB