DriveDx says my internal Crucial SSD is overheating in my 2011 iMac.

The Crucial SSD looks Ok with its temperatures which is very surprising as the BX500 series is very easy to overheat. In the future I highly recommend going with the MX500 series for much better performance. I've tested a few of the BX500 series SSDs and found them to be extremely slow (as slow as a hard drive) and tend to easily overheat which will also throttle their speed. I've never had a problem with the MX500 series SSDs in our organization's Macs except for a firmware bug that incorrectly sets the "Current Pending Sector" attribute temporarily, then later resets it. The bug was reported to Crucial shortly after the SSD was first launched (five years ago?) and Crucial has never fixed it. It doesn't hurt anything except you when you use an app like DriveDx which monitors the SSD's SMART attributes it keeps falsely alerting you.

I've seen DriveDx and other SMART monitoring apps incorrectly interpret an SSD's health so I only rely on these apps to alert me to potential issues which I then verify by manually examining the actual SMART attributes and health report. If you look at the health report for the Crucial SSD you will see that the "Lifetime Max Temp" is 113F (45C) and the "Temperature Max Limit" is 158F (70C) and the "Recommended Max Temp" is 149F (65C) so this SSD is well within its expected operating range.

Now the Samsung SSD looks like it has an overheating issue. The temp for the Samsung SSD appears to be at its "Temperature Max Limit" of 158F (70C) for the "Lifetime Max Temp" value which is the highest temp the SSD has reached. This is not completely unusual for an SSD depending on where it is located in the computer and the cooling it can receive. I'm wondering whether having the Samsung SSD behind the optical drive is trapping the heat and the SSD isn't getting enough air flowing over it. These iMacs can get hot inside. Keep in mind when an SSD reaches the "Temperature Max Limit" which is usually 70C (158F), then the SSD will be throttled to help lower its temperature which means the SSD will slow down significantly. Excessive heat can prematurely wear and potentially damage an SSD's NAND memory.

However, the Read & Write speed of the SSD is much less than the Crucial SSD (perhaps the Samsung SSD is your boot SSD?). The "Wear Leveling Count" has dropped a good bit on the Samsung SSD, but you have written 17.7 TB to it as well, but it still seems like a bit excessive drop. Do you have TRIM enabled? How much free space is on the Samsung SSD? I know that "smartctl" which is the actual utility DriveDX uses to access the drives' health information doesn't report the speeds properly in its test, but the difference between the two SSDs is significant unless the Samsung is the current boot drive when you ran DriveDx.

Does the Samsung SSD have a newer firmware version available?

Except for the Samsung SSD overheating I would say both SSDs look healthy.

FYI, in the future please configure the apps to report the temperatures in Celcius since that is what all the review sites and benchmark sites use reporting system temps and drive temps.

We'll see what your EtreCheck report has to say.

Post the full DriveDx report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper.

The Temperature attributes should be treated differently than the other SMART attributes, but some apps get confused and it doesn't help that some drives use different attributes to monitor the temp making it harder for apps to provide exceptions. The DriveDx report should show the maximum temp the SSD has reached in its life.

The write speed of the SSD is extremely slow (21MB/s). Which ever SSD was used for booting is the one which is definitely slow. Since TRIM is not enabled on the Samsung SSD it may just be that the SSD is overworked on trying to clean up the unused NAND cells which can cause an SSD to slow down after lots of use. You can try letting the Mac sit at the Option Boot screen for several hours to let the SSD's internal Garbage Collection maintenance routines time to run which may help to restore some performance. You can also enable TRIM on the SSD by issuing the following command to enable TRIM on all the internal SSDs:

sudo  trimforce  enable

Afterwards I think you need to temporarily boot into Safe Mode so it forces TRIM to immediately run to clear the NAND cells. Reboot normally and see if the SSD is able to write any faster.

Make sure to have good frequent and regular backups since TRIM could potentially lead to data loss which is why Apple does not enable TRIM automatically for third party SSDs.

If TRIM doesn't help, then you may need to use the SSD's built-in hardware secure erase feature to reset the SSD to factory defaults which can restore any lost performance and may also fix any odd issues with the SSD. You will need a Linux boot disk and utility to do this so let me know if you want instructions to do this.

FYI, the BX500 series SSD is a very slow SSD that overheats very easily.

In the future just attach a screenshot of the MacsFanControl window.

Let us know how you make out with it.

James Phoenix wrote:

Etrecheck says Samsung drive is failing but also it's hard to upgrade to an ssd. It is one!

I'm trying to enter the full thing but i can't get it to post.

Don't give up on the Samsung SSD yet. The overheating will play a part in the poor performance of the SSD. Plus maybe there is a newer firmware for the Samsung SSD that can improve its performance. Then there is the built-in hardware secure erase feature which can reset the SSD to factory defaults which can sometimes resolve any odd issues with the SSD and restore lost performance. I've fixed a lot of SSDs this way, even ones where the selftest had failed.

You must actually paste the textual part of the Macs Fan Control file here. You just ended up pasting the path to the file.

Yes, it is possible the Samsung SSD isn't getting enough air flow to keep it cool. One option might be to attach the optical drive's thermal sensor directly to the Samsung SSD which should cause the fan for the optical drive to run faster in order to cool the Samsung SSD better. I forget whether this particular iMac has a separate temperature sensor attached to the optical drive (I know the older models did).

I don't know what all those things mean. Raw?

38C isn't bad.

Try Macs Fan Control for a more detailed breakdown of component temperatures.

I see you have two topics going about this. To save us a lot of duplication effort it would help to keep it to one topic. Perhaps the other one since I am the only other person posting here so far.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252572580