Argon One m.2 SSD very hot 89C / 192F

ARGON ONE (V2 and M.2) DISCUSSION
1

Hi all,

I’m concerned about the temperature of the SSD in my Argon One m.2 case. SMART data reports the SSD is 89 degrees Celsius (192F) when it’s near idle. I guess this is because it’s in a closed compartment with absolutely no cooling. After a bit of reading my understanding is higher temperatures increases the chance of data loss, particularly outside of SSD specs.

The Raspberry Pi 4 runs Home Assistant, a very lightly loaded web server, Pi Hole, a few other utilities. CPU is usually below 2% other than occasional spikes. The SSD is Transcend MTS970T-I, idle power consumption 1.2W.

Looking at iotop the read and write are on 0 bytes per second about half the time. Eyeballing it it looks like writes of around 25KB/sec average, reads are less than half of writes.

The main part of the case is 48 degrees with the fan off which is fine. The SSD is 89 degrees when the pi is near idle. The SSD is an industrial model that has a max of 85 degrees, so it’s working outside spec.

Has anyone else found anything similar? Is this normal and expected?

Does anyone have any suggestions for cooling the SSD? I’m considering taking the M.2 SSD enclosure part off the bottom of the case, adding a small heatsink, connecting it with a short USB cable, and seeing if that helps temperatures, but this leaves the SSD without physical protection which is the point of a case. Adding an expensive SSD cooler with a fan could help more, but that increases noise and doesn’t help with protection.

Opinions and suggestions are welcome.

> top
load average: 0.24, 0.26, 0.21

> ls -1 /dev/sd? | xargs -n1 smartctl -A
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0000   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -       89
2

Values above 50° Celsius sounds much to high for a SSD in idle state. Are you sure that nothing is defective?
Why do you doesn‘t use the case fan to cool down the whole system? Current version of the argon1.sh script installs a service script which uses 2 fan curves. The first one is for CPU temperature and the second one for SSD/NVMe (HDD).

3

I agree, above 50C is worrying. SSDs can go up to 80C without problems, but it reduces reliability and lifespan. The m.2 SSDs in my main PC have good m.2 heatsinks including a fan in one heatsink and sit at about 30C at idle, and hit perhaps 50C for very short periods if they’re really really busy.

I don’t think anything is defective. The first m.2 SSD I had in this enclosure failed, which I now suspect was due to heat. The enclosure design didn’t take into account the amount of heat produced by a modern m.2 SSD.

I’ve been experimenting a little this morning, here’s the temperatures with different SSD cooling.

90c - m.2 inside case, no fan
71c - m.2 inside case, 50% fan
66c - m.2 with case open, using an extra USB cable
64c - as 66c but with m.2 label removed
42c - m.2 case open, passive cooler fitted (Jeyi Battleship, from memory)

IMHO the unmodified closed case is not fit for purpose to keep the SSD sufficiently cool. I’m going to get an external m.2 ssd enclosure, not sure passive or fan cooled yet, so I can close the case and have the SSD adequately cooled.

With the very hot SSD no longer under the Pi the CPU temperature has dropped from 48c to 34c. So the hot SSD increased the temperature by 14c.