Samsung 990 Pro heatsink removal.

@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.

@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.

@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.

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.

@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.