Crucial M500 240GB mSATA overheating issue

[#1]

A few days ago I received my new Crucial M500 240GB mSATA SSD (CT240M500SSD3). After installing it into my laptop (Schenker B513) I noticed my touchpad getting a lot warmer than before SSD installation (The SSD is installed right below the touchpad). Reading the device temperature with smartctl revealed > 70°C (yep, Celsius!) with a lifetime maximum of 79°C.

I called Crucial support but they told me that the device would break before reaching 79°C and that SMART values are not read accurately. However, I'm sure that SMART values are accurate because touching the SSD will burn my fingers in only a second. I updated the firmware from MU03 to MU05 which did not solve the problem. The SSD also runs hot when it is in idle mode: I booted Xubuntu 14.04 from a USB flash drive, left the SSD unmounted and observed the temps. After about 10 minutes the temps already exceeded 60°C without doing ANYTHING.

Tomorrow I'll get the chance to test the SSD in another computer and to measure the temperature with a thermometer to confirm that SMART temperature values are accurate. Until then I'd like to ask you: Has anyone else had this issue before? What are your temperature readings for the M500 and how hot does it feel?

Thank you.

[#2]

There have been other posts on here querying the temps of the msata version so it seems 60C is at least common for that variant. 79C is strange though - as far as I know, the thermal protection should kick in at 70 to slow the drive down to cool it.

http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/Crucial-m500-msata-temperature-problem/m-p/145774

http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/Crucial-CT240-M500-SSD3-operating-temperatur/td-p...

http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/Crucial-M500-mSATA-120GB-temperature/m-p/137993

[#3]

Thank you for your reply. I've looked through the linked threads but it seems there is no clear answer to why the drive may exceed it's rated temperature. It took me a bit longer, but I finally did some measurements with a thermometer. Here are my results: The SSD's ambient temperature is around 40°C, which should be OK in my opinion. I put the SSD under load with dd if =/dev/sda of=/dev/null bs=32768 After 15 minutes, the temps reached 70°C (in SMART as well as on the thermometer, so SMART values are actually accurate) but the drive throttled (I guess) and did not exceed this temperature. I have no idea why it did not happen again, but it didn't, so my problem can be considered solved. I was not able to reconstruct the issue since. However, I noticed that the SSD's temperatues are generally higher under Linux (Xubuntu 14.04 with 3.13.0-24-generic kernel in my case) than under Windows 7 Professional. Even in idle mode, temps will go up to (but not over) 70°C under Linux, while idle temps under Windows are around 50-55°C. I don't know if this is driver or firmare related and I have no idea how I could figure out the reason for this. My mount options are [rw,noatime,errors=remount,ro, discard]. Any thoughts on that?

[#4 · Accepted solution]

Some thoughts:
1. There is nothing wrong with your mount options that I can see. Those look good for an SSD with ext4 file system.
2. There might be software to control the laptop cooling fan, which could help.
3. Some operating systems might be better than others at optimising power consumption and therefore temperature dissipation.
4. There might be alternative kernels or kernel compile options which could help.
5. With the 2.5 inch M500 there is a thermal pad between the Marvell Controller and the aluminium case and this has also been proposed as a solution to overheating in the Intel NUC:
http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/sb/CS-034326.htm

Perhaps some type of thermal pad could be used in your laptop?

Since you mention Xbuntu, this might help.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PowerManagement/ReducedPower

[#5]

Thank you very much for your help! I've investigated on your suggestions and think that I found a solution. I checked some other Linux kernel versions but did not see any differences. Temperatures were up to 79°C in idle mode again. However, linked Xubuntu help page contained the solution: echo min_power > /sys/class/scsi_host/host4/link_power_management_policy did drastically improve my SSD's temperatures, which are currently at 48°C and thus perfectly fine. It still reaches 79°C when under heavy load (which is unrealistic in everyday use) but the SSD's throttling avoids anything higher than that. I'll still ask the manufacturer if there are thermal pads available to lower temperatures. While the SSD might not be damaged, I still worry about neighboring components.

[#6]

this settings really helps with our problem in our msata crucial over heating problem putting directly a high rpm fan to our msata ssd will have a huge advantage to drop down the temperature even in heavy load like gaming application 

here are some result of my SSD 

[#7]

I wouldn't say gaming is a heavy task for SSD  There is some more information related to temperature posted in this thread.

[#8]

Under Linux, I did this and had my M550 msata SSD temp drop from 67C to 47C:

echo min_power > /sys/class/scsi_host/host5/link_power_management

There will be more than one hostN in your  /sys/class/scsi_host/ directory. Just echo min_power at all of them. Of course you have to do this command as root.

I think in Windows there is some goofy 3rd party SSD tweaking tool where you can enable DIPM.

No idea for Mac OS X. Anybody know of a solution?

[#9]

Upgraded to new firmware MU02. A little better:

In Linux, with ALPM enabled, drive runs cool.
In OS X Yosemite, temperature is pegged at 67C.
Found a great Linux power management tool to automatically keep ALPM and other power saving things enabled: http://linrunner.de/en/tlp/tlp.html