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Repair guides for different types of storage devices, ranging from internal hard drives to network attached drives.

Samsung 990 Pro heatsink removal.

Picked up a 990 Pro (with heatsink) the other day because I got a good deal on it, but it doesn't fit with the built in heatsink.

I'm aware that a wise person would just return it and get a regular one instead, but like many on this site that just ain't who I am.

Furthermore I'm aware that removing this heatsink will void my warranty, but if Samsung's reputation is anything to go by (I used quite a bit of their drives, and I still do!) this drive will go well past that period!

This heatsink also has a little RGB LED on it, so I wouldn't be surprised if there's a little cable/connector on it...

So... How do I take off the heatsink from my Samsung 990?

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Sometimes the risks outweigh the reward!

From the images Samsung offers looks like there is four screws which hold the heatsink package together besides the TIM material covering the chips. But to release the grip of the TIM you will need to spin the bottom plate and heatsink slightly along the surface which you can’t do here as the heatsink bottom plate has four fold over tabs that block it. To add to that prying will over stress the ball pads securing the chips to the PCB base.

Block Image

So the bottom line here is the chance of success is very low and just like a raw egg broken in your hands offers no meal. Even if it was a good deal.

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I'll find a way, I'd like to keep my PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot for 5.0 capable devices.

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Turns out it wasn't as difficult as I had expected, had to unscrew 4 5-point screws, take off the warranty sticker, cautiously wiggle it around a bit (preferably with a spudger, or in my case a fingernail) and pull it out. As expected it's just a bare 990 Pro. As for the LED I was sorta worried about, turns out this is just a single light on the device itself!

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It's BS that they think they can enforce their void warranty policy based on removing a heatsink (on an m.2 SSD that was about 30% cheaper with the heatsink than without) for application as internal storage - especially when the new cooling solution is superior to said heatsink.

I don't think this is legal and they "cut me a break" by accepting my 980 Pro 2TB that has all of a sudden had its read speed cut in half for RMA. I installed the drive on a mid tier motherboard, with high performance thermal pads, along with a higher end case and mostly enthusiast grade components.

The idiots answering the phone at least speak English as their primary language, but they're just as ignorant as their Indian customer service counterpart when it comes to being able to apply any common sense to the situation. Ridiculous.

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@darrenkullander - Did you return it as it was sold to you? If no they are legally within their rights.

So while one could argue it's a heatsink, and doesn't affect the SSD electronically if I remove it. But the rub here is they don't know what you did! Someone could have not been so smart putting on better cooling system.

Then what happened? Why did the SSD fail? Maybe it was heat damage what if the better cooling system wasn't that good. There are some tools which can test the drive and see what failed. Did they even tell you why it failed?

I'm not taking sides here, sometimes it's not so cut and dry and support bots answering the phone aren't always the most tech savvy either.

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@danj They haven't received it yet. Just mailed it today. I still had all the original thermal pads and the heatsink. It would be pretty easy to put their drive in a situation where their included heatsink wouldn't keep everything within an acceptable range of operating temps. I'm suspecting the failure is due to the firmware that was causing early failures years back. The drive does have a 5-year warranty, so a lot of things could have happened since I bought it in 2021. Samsung Magician's diagnostics stated it was in good condition, but it was only hitting sequential and random read speeds that were roughly half of what the drive had historically been capable of until as recently as last month.

The whole reason I gave them for the removal of the heatsink was pretty %#*@(sorry - didn't know dam-n is nsfw)reasonable. I built a PC, bought the models (two 990 Pro 4TB m.2s as well) with heat sinks because they were on sale for substantially cheaper, and I removed them so everything would fit on my motherboard.

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@darrenkullander - what are you running on the system for apps or games? While I would be surprised if you hit the limit of writes in even 50% of the cell blocks you might have. Somewhere around 50% the drive will often slow down as TRIM needs to shift filled blocks to more worn blocks so the wear is evened out. This is one of the issues with SSD's over HDD's. HDD's face file fragmentation so the drive has to work harder stitching the file together.

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I pretty much exclusively play games and 90% of them are on my 4TB drives (my Steam collection) I just have a couple games, some basic productivity applications, and W11Pro on the 980 Pro.

Luckily I had a 2TB Crucial T500 on hand - I just cloned the drive and am back up at full speeds.

Note: I also have at least a 10% over-provision on all 4 of my m.2s.

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@darrenkullander - Ah! So the drive was full with cached data then! The act of cloning it (Copying) your stuff to a second drive freed up the space the cache was taking which might have been quite large or even had a bad pointer slowing the fetch.

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