When I start Windows the 1st thing I do, while processes/utilities are starting up, is fire up HWMonitor. Sitting on the far left of the screen, at a glance I can see the GPU temp & load, the CPU temp, fan speeds, CPU core frequencies etc. HWMonitor actually shows much more info than that, but I collapse the trees for a lot of stuff, so what I want to see fits in the window without scrolling. Three of the trees I collapse are for SSDs mounted side by side, The 3 SSDs sit on the backside of the panel the motherboard mounts to, and are behind a door that itself is behind the side panel for the case -- they obviously don't get much air flow. Anyway, I see the self-reported temp of each SSD before I collapse the trees with that data, and within less than 2 minutes of powering on the PC, with none of these SSDs having Any activity, their temps are all over the place, with a 15° C range between the hottest & coolest. The only conclusion I can reach is that their temp reporting is a bit of a crapshoot. I tried to confirm that, but had no luck using Google, and Bing chat had no idea either.
These aren't the most expensive, fastest SSDs, so they generally run cooler -- I didn't want to stick an SSD that runs hot in such a closed off environment -- and so it's not something I worry about. The thing that bothers me though is that if SSD temp reporting tends to be that inaccurate, it could be a challenge for those running faster, hotter drives. SSDs usually throttle themselves if temps get into the danger range where data or the components in the SSD might be damaged [like CPUs]. If you can't rely 100% on the reported temp, do you go overboard with cooling, do you risk an SSD not throttling itself when it should, and/or are you going to get slower speeds because your cooling isn't enough?
