My Samsung 970 EVO NVME SSD reaches 50 – 52 C when idle. Ambient is around 28 – 30C. In general, I consider anything above 50 as not normal.
There are 4 fans in cabinet and no more space left for any more fan. By using thermal pads, I have marginally brought it down by 2 C. No other device is running that hot in my system. Samsung says take it to service center.
Is 52C normal for NVMe SSDs?
There are plenty of similar threads on other forums like Samsung/Reddit/TomsHardware, nothing conclusive.
Reason for Edit - Question made concise and added recent update
42 Answers
According to the Datasheet the temperature is in spec:
If in doubt, you could always install an additional fan into your system.
The question "50 - 52 C NVMe SSD idle temps - Normal?" is based upon the assumption that the idle temperature is a measure to determine if your device is performing correctly.
Unfortunately that is wrong.
Consider your NVMe drive being a heater with a power consumption of 5 Watt to 8 Watt.
Turning on this heater will increase its temperature above ambient level(read the comment of Daniel B, his M.2 drive yields a temperature increase of 19 Kelvin).
The increase in temperature (Delta Kelvin) is a function of the surface area of your NVMe ( roughly 80 mm x 22 mm) and the heat conductivity between the plastic housing of your memory chips and the surrounding air which is comparably low.
Therefore the only thing you can compare is Delta Kelvin under comparable conditions such as
- same power consumption
- no metal cooler sticked to the top of your NVME
- no additional airflow (caused by a fan).
Going by your name you probably live in India with current ambient temperature at around 30° C. I consider a temperature increase of 20 Kelvin as perfectly OK (I am currently not running a NVME card here in Germany with ambient temperature at 22°C in my room).
Your temperature at 50°C is perfectly within spec (as opposed to what others pretend). Your device has no moving parts like a rotating hard drive and has rather to be compared to semi-conductors.
The disadvantage of your location compared to mine is that my thermal window is ranging from 22°C to 70°C (Delta Kelvin = 48) and yours is maybe only at Delta Kelvin = 30 (but in two months my window will fall down to 40).
SSD failure as a function of temperature
Source:
My other Samsung SATA (2.5”) SSD never crosses 34 idle and 45 during benchmarks.
Given that the ICs inside are well connected to the housing the effective surface to distribute heat is bigger. That will lower the temperature inside.
I guess it was around 40 -42 C a few weeks ago.
In this case your temperature increase is only 8 to 10 degrees which is no figure to claim about.
If you still feel bad about 50°C and think that your NVMe behave like Platform A on the picture follow the advice of mashuptwice.
