Solved Which thermal pad for heat sink? Decision based on what?

Bedtime for me. Glad Big John is asleep now, or he might swat us both for being completely OT, and for loading up his servers with nonsense. G’night, Ghot, and all of you patient members who’ve been waiting in vain for anything of significance to emerge from this conversation. Sleep well.

Wisewiz said:

I have a new PCIe adapter for an NVMe drive, and it came with a heat sink for the drive, which had two thermal stick-on pads with it: one thick and one quite thin. I've had really good luck with my four NVMe drives' temps, so I want to use this heat sink, but I don't know (haven't received the NVMe yet) whether some NVMe are thicker than others, and so some would take the thin and some the thick. What's the basis for the decision on which to use?

Click to expand...

Hi,
Firstly is it a double sided m.2 or single sided ?
Double sided gets a little tricky
Mostly because they don't have chips all the way across the back like the top of the m.2 will.
Top is easy thicker pads goes there boom.

Thinner on the back if it is flat = no chips to cover.

If it has chips on the back you need a thin pad on the lowest part and another across the entire side like the front has.
Both these can be thin although the chips should have a thicker pad like the front has.

Adapter looks fine by the way
No pad on the back this is just like if you were installing it on a mother board nothing on the bottom of the m.2.
This is not great but will be fine the m.2 is single sided. = no chips to cover.
One pad on the front
Yes the top with the pad will have contact with the heatsink.

@ThrashZone Thanks for that. I sorta think I know what I’m doing now.

The thermal pad should be fixed to the heatsink.
Then you temporarily assemble it, then remove the heatsink and see if you get an impression in the pad along all the SSD chips.
You may need thicker material over the Controller chip and DRAM chips. A thicker pad might work over the whole length if it is flexible enough.

It should be a matter of common sense surely, good contact between the heatsink and chips on the SSD.

I have some 2 TB WD Black SSDs Single Sided and the chips are different heights.

Thanks, @Helmut, I’m okay for common sense; just needed a little boost for my confidence.

Wisewiz said:

I have a new PCIe adapter for an NVMe drive, and it came with a heat sink for the drive, which had two thermal stick-on pads with it: one thick and one quite thin. I've had really good luck with my four NVMe drives' temps, so I want to use this heat sink, but I don't know (haven't received the NVMe yet) whether some NVMe are thicker than others, and so some would take the thin and some the thick. What's the basis for the decision on which to use?

Click to expand...

Check the relative heights of the chips and use a pad per chip to equalize the heights

Rollback_Jockey said:

Check the relative heights of the chips and use a pad per chip to equalize the heights

Click to expand...

I think if you look at my shot in #5, you'see that the side I'm going to stick the pad to is flat, so that's one fewer issues.

Wisewiz said:

@ThrashZone Thanks for that. I sorta think I know what I’m doing now.

Click to expand...

Just a fyi
You could get a cheap heatsink that covers both sides and mounts with just one screw like the example Ghot showed it will fit on that card.
There are pretty good 10us heatsinks to that work pretty well
I added a couple on my laptop that I altered the height on a little so they'd fit.

Marked this Solved. Thank you all for your patience with me and your help with my tiny issue.

Oh, look. I just hit 3,000 posts. Watch out @Ghot! I'm comin'.

A final (I hope) note: I used the thick one to make sure there was complete contact between the chips and the sink. The chips were actually on the side that took the thermal pad, not the flat side shown in my shot in #5 above. Didn't realize that until the drive arrived in the mailbox today and I saw the orientation of the connectors. Anyway it's working beautifully. The one desgnated Disk 0 on the right is the new one. Now that's one cool M.2 NVMe.