[jeffbee]

Most SSDs have temperature thresholds at 85C or higher. Why do you care if yours maintains 40C?

[zozbot234]

There are reasons to assume that data retention might drop exponentially as temperature increases. So if you care about the data, you'll want to avoid overheating your storage media.

[jeffbee]

Power-off storage temperature is a problem for MLC NAND, but when powered on the NAND cells need to reach a high temperature to operate properly. If you are cooling the flash chips with a heatsink (rather than cooling the controller) you will be forcing the device to dump power into the cells to heat them to a temperature where they work properly.

3D NAND hits its best program time and raw bit error rate at about 70C.

Edit: See data table on page 27. Retention is directly proportional to device active temperature, i.e. higher cell temperature during programming leads to higher retention. https://www.jedec.org/sites/default/files/Alvin_Cox%20%5bCom...

[touisteur]

That might be one of the most counterintuitive durability fact I've heard in a long time. Thanks a lot for sharing.

[kkielhofner]

I noted in another comment I needed eight x4 NVMe across two x16 slots in a very dense chassis. I was pleasantly surprised at the temperatures.

The hardware is in a colocation facility and I like to have plenty of buffer with standard operating temperatures in case of a cooling failure, etc. Is maintaining 40C necessary under normal conditions? Nope, but it's definitely a nice to have regardless.