m500 msata high temperatures 70C

[#1]

Dear comrades,

I recently bought a Clevo W230SS with msata m500 240gb preinstalled. I have noticed that both Crystal Disk Info and HWinfo report really high temperatures, around 63C during internet browsing and up to 70C after 1 hour of Battlefield 3. Is it normal for this ssd? I mean I have 120gb m4 SATA in my old laptop and it's ice cold compared to m500, just a little bit over 30C. Makes me concerned whether msata m500 functions properly.... I realize that W230SS is a small and powerful laptop so inside chassis temps can rise really high during gameplay, but Crucial quickly heats up to 60C after cold start, so it's definitely not GPU/CPU that make SSD overheat.

Thank you

[#2]

Seems normal for the msata: http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/Crucial-M500-240GB-mSATA-overheating-issue/m-p/15...

[#3]

Yeah I did some googling and high temperatures seem to affect some other users as well. I was wondering whether everyone who has m500 msata experiences higher than normal temps or it's just some of us. I am more inclined to think that it's only some of us because there aren't that many complaints on the web and I haven't found any mention of it in the reviews...

I think I might call local Clevo reseller tomorrow and ask what they think about it. But if any of you guys have something to add on this topic please feel free to do so. I want to figure out whether Crucial intended these SSDs to be so hot. I mean it's the hottest component in my laptop right now, 15C hotter than a quad core CPU. 

[#4]

Well, a reseller rep didn't give me any definite answer whether temps up to 70C are normal and whether they had reports of such high temps before. It appeared to me that he's aware of the high temp issue because it sounded like he tried to avoid the question. He just asked whether it causes any performance issues and offered me to send the ssd back to them so they could run a test. I declined because I don't have another 240gb SSD to copy my data to and I don't want to be without a laptop for a couple of weeks. Nevertheless we agreed that if I notice any issues in performance/operation, I will be able to send the ssd to them so they could check it.

[#5]

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lexus232 wrote:

I was wondering whether everyone who has m500 msata experiences higher than normal temps or it's just some of us.

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Yeah, I have no idea unfortunately.  I've seen lots that say it's hot but no-one say it isn't.  But then, who would wander on to a forum to say 'i got a new SSD and it runs nice and cool'?   That's kinda the problem here.  We only see the concerns and have no way of knowing the difference between everyone else being fine or whether they simply haven't noticed.

[#6]

I agree, targetbsp.

Just for the record, I put ssd into another msata slot in my W230SS and it heats even more now lol. 69 during web surfing. I will put it back into the default slot and see how it goes in the coming week. Maybe even do some synthetic tests to see whether performance degrades upon reaching 70C degrees.

[#7]

I can say that I have the same laptop (W230SS) and I am experiencing the same heat issues. Sometimes when I'm browsing websites the temps hit 70C-73C. After a cold boot, the temps are around 65C but once it gets up in temperatures, it doens't seem to go down. I have another mechanical drive in the 2.5inch drive bay. My battery life also kinda went down after installing the msata drive. It shows me around 3hours and 30 mins now, where before with just the mechanical drive it was 5hours and 40mins of light browsing. Im not sure if its related to the drive or its because I decided to move all my userdata files and some applications are installed to the mechanical drive and they are both being utilized at the same time and causing higher power draw. I wonder if anyone else noticed this>

[#8]

So, I found out that when I installed windows 8.1, I had left my seond HDD in the computer, and the windows 8 installer had made a partition in my mechanical drive as well (I think it contained some boot files required for UEFI computers). I'm thinking that when windows was running, both drives were being utilized constantly, and maybe killing my battery life. So I went ahead and removed the HDD, deleted the partitions on the SSD and reinstalled windows without the HDD connected. After setting it up and installing all my programs and drivers back on, I plugged the HDD back in. All my steam games and a few small applications were already on the HDD so recovering all my files wasn't hard.

Since then the battery life went back to around 5hrs (light browsing), idle power consumption was around 8-11 watts and the temperatures on the SSD is around 39C-41C on idle, 45C on a bit of gaming from what HWMonitor shows and crystalDiskmark gave me normal numbers too.

So, this is a big enough improvement to make me think this was the problem. So far, the SSD hasn't even gone past 50C yet.

Note: I also tried to update the M500 firmware to revision mu05, but this didn't change anything.

[#9]

Oh, so it is possible to get down from 70+ to 45, that is a good news I believe. I would probably say that heat means power consumption (and/or poor thermal design too). My guess is that clean 8.1 install set all power settings properly for the drive.

For those who are still facing high temperatures I would suggest to try following steps:

- make following registry modification in order to enable HIPM and DIPM options in Windows power plan options (I think it works only with Intel RST driver installed, not sure of that though)

- change "Setting" to "HIPM+DIPM"

I am testing this on 2.5'' M550 right now and surprisingly it gives me some decent results (knocking on wood). 

Before, after clean W8.1 install my drive were reaching about 47°C during some gaming (I think it was because of poor thermal design of my laptop and some idle power consumption of the drive) but now I observe 36-37°C as a drive temperature. That is gooood 

[#10]

Thank you for this suggestion bogdan! 

I have a new msata M550 512gb, and was having no luck keeping its temps down.  From a cold boot it would quickly reach into the 60s°C, and was resulting in BSODs due to drive shutdown.  

I decided to try a fresh install of Win8.1, and saw temps climb up to 86°C as I was applying the registry modification.  As soon as I applied the HIPM+DIPM settings, the temperature on the drive quickly plummeted to ~46°C (internal temps on my laptop hover at ~45°C - clevo w230ss).

So far I'm BSOD free!