I got a pc that suffers from severe heating problems because of its poorly designed passive cooling case. I tried several strategies to put temperature under control, did a lot of tests with thermald, but ended up hacking a fan into the case. However, I still have problems with ssd temperatures.
Right now, as I write this, the nvme ssd is at 67ºC and easily goes beyond 80 or 90 during data transfers. I already lost 2 ssds before realizing this was the problem, because I was controlling just the cpu temperature.
There’s no physical way to force airflow where the ssd is, so I was wondering if there’s some way to throttle data transfer of something to prevent the ssd temperatures from reaching a threshold. All I could find was a vibecoded github repository. I don’t care if data transfer gets ridiculously slow, as long as the ssd remain safe, and I can’t consider getting any new hardware right now.
I’m currently running fedora 44 on that machine
Edit: I thought there was an easier software mitigation to that, but apparently, solutions will tend to the hardware side, so here are the hardware details:
- It’s an unbranded chinese cheap mini pc with a heat dissipation case that doesn’t dissipate well
- The ssd is mounted on the back of the motherboard. The model is a sandisk M.2 1TB 2280
Here’s a photo of the case, for the reference (don’t judge me lol):
Can’t you put a heat dissipator on your SSD ?
And I know you said you don’t want to buy any new hardware but if you want to throttle your SSD you Might as well buy an HDD. It’s not that expensive.
Would a dissipator be able to reduce that peak of around 90ºC to something below the limit of 70 (from the manufacturer’s site)?
About the hdd, this machine is a mini pc that only has 1 nvme slot and no sata connectors. It was a terrible idea to buy it in the first place, but I’m stuck with it for now…
I don’t know how it would reduce the temperature but I do know that it will reduce. Normally, with a heat dissipator you should expect to be under 70°C but that also kinda depends on airflow.
Ah… You dould try an external HDD but that wouldn’t solve everything so… Maybe try the heat dissipator, rather than going to a software that might well accelerate hardware deterioration.
Thanks, I will give it a try. By the way, an external storage isn’t a bad idea. How could I not think about it before?
Quite a lot of performance between a modern SSD and an HDD to be fair. You’d have to be down clocking to like 1% utilisation to meet HDDs.