Cooling an Overheating NVMe SSD

Mon, 15 Mar 2021 15:10:50 +0000

The SSD in my Windows 10 system started reporting failures, and as luck would have it, died while I was cloning it to a new drive. I suspect death was caused by overheating, and I addressed that with my new setup.

This Windows 10 system is in an NCase M1 v5 SFF case with an ASUS ROG STRIX Z390-I GAMING mini-ITX motherboard and a Samsung 970 EVO NVMe M.2 SSD drive. The motherboard has two M.2 slots, one on the front of the motherboard and one on the back. The slot on the front has a heatsink, but I noticed the drive runs hot even under no load. Some googling showed this to be a common problem with the heatsink and M.2 slot being heated by the motherboard chipset, so I moved the SSD to the slot on the back of the motherboard. The SSD still reported +60°C temperatures under load, and I added a passive heatsink, and that kept temperatures in the low 50°C’s even under load.

Asus P5E-VM HDMI motherboard

Fri, 16 May 2008 23:31:00 +0000

In the ongoing saga to get a motherboard that works well with Vista SP1 going to sleep, I have yet again switched motherboards.

As previously posted I’ve tried an Intel DG33TL board, and an Intel DQ35JO, and I am now using an Asus P5E-VM HDMI board.

I was happy with the Intel DQ35JO, but this did not last very long. A few days after posting I found my machine with garbage characters on the screen, requiring a cold boot. Intel support was of little help, but a few days later I updated the firmware on my ThinkPad T61, and I read that one of the fixes in the firmware was to fix garbage characters on the screen when sleeping or resuming from sleep caused by the AMT feature. The DQ35JO board also has AMT, so maybe that was the same problem.

Asus on Pieter Viljoen's Blog

Cooling an Overheating NVMe SSD

Asus P5E-VM HDMI motherboard