So, 9.5mm SSD in a 7mm bay

Got a new laptop yesterday and immediately ripped the SSD out of my old laptop only to find it physically would not fit :rant:

After spending a bit of time begrudgingly looking at ordering a new 7mm replacement, my eyes happened to stop on the picture of an mSATA SSD....which looked very naked....

So, I placed a couple of sheets of cardboard into the bottom of the HDD install area to insulate it and then removed the SSD from its case.....plugged it in and was away :)

Handy if you do what I did and overlook the space available in these newer thin laptops.

Some 9mm SSDs actually have a spacer between the two halves of the case which you can remove to make it a 7mm drive. You'll still break the warranty seal in doing so, but it's another possibility.

Sounds like a great bit of adaptation.

Caveat. Do 'cased' SSDs use the case for heat dissipation? I wouldn't have thought so. But if they do, it's not so much about whether it works at all (it clearly does), but how long for, and/or data integrity. Which would make me a tad nervous. ;)

Edit - What I mean is drives intentionally supplied 'naked' may be designed with that in mind.

I think some of the newer ones do generate enough heat for that to be a consideration....this is an older Corsair Force 3 and runs quite cool...I also can't see how the important parts would touch the casing either, so I doubt it would have provided much benefit to heat dissipation.

You get the odd drive which uses thermal pads to couple the ICs to the metallic case but many don't and just have the PCB suspended between the two halves. In fact many drives have mSATA/M.2 versions which are essentially identical aside from the PCB form factor and they're generally just installed freely in the slot.