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):



Here’s the inside:
I usually put a self-stick alluminium fan on the controller. You can get 10 of them for a few $. Doesn’t help much if the entire internals is overheated of course.
Oh, shit. Forget my other comment. Just get a SSD cooler. With this much space you may get away with a bit of added thermal mass; assuming you aren’t constantly transfering large files. For small bursts just handling the heat spikes may suffice.
How much distance would you say is there between the ssd top surface and the case panel?
1.7 cm
Oof.
You can definitely fit this and it only seven dollars but you can also fit this one with a little fan on it for $17 (you’d need a four pin fan header on your motherboard to run that).