I would say. Get some 1mm and 0.5mm thermal pads like Artic TP-3 and cut it to size for the controller and memory chip. I have a board with a similar SSD setup and the stock thermal pads wasnt making contact with the SSD when the heatsink was mounted.
I Didnt bother removing the stock thermal pad that came on the heatsink and it still provided good heat transfer even when double padded. You can remove the stock pad and add more TP-3 pads (I think they go up to 2mm... but coolermaster make 3mm pads - Your choice but Arctic says TP-3 can be stacked) but the issue is just the added cost.
Cut some TP-3 and lay it over the controller. Controller may take 0.5mm or 1mm you have to experiment which and see if the pad crushes down. The same for the NAND chip aswell but it may take 1mm.
Sometimes controllers and NAND chips arent completely 100% level with one another and the difference could be between 0.1-0.3mm. The long heatsink and its mounting system with the two screws wont account for the differences and the problem results in either no contact with the thermal pad or very little contact (if no contact at all) so you basically need to fill in the gaps where it isnt making good contact.
You could also use cheaper thermal pads, it should still show results if TP-3 isnt available or too expensive in your part of the world. I used TP-3 because its what i had in my draw.
Here is my before and after...
Before:
View attachment 370355
After:
View attachment 370356
Two of the 2TB SSDs sit right next to my 6700XT too so they get blasted with 70'c temps when i game. These SSDs will still run '
warm' when i game but by that time they'll only be used for reads (mainly idle after maps are loaded up) so thermals shouldnt be that high. I dont exactly know the thermals when I game. I stopped caring about the issue after I saw my changes were good but i'll leave HWmon running for now, play a few rowdy games of KF2 for an hour and see how things do.
View attachment 370357
I did this '
mod' for all my SSDs. Even the one sitting in the highest slot closest to the CPU (the 1TB) and it still showed good results even if it wasnt struggling to stay cool originally. The WD512 SSD is a different matter I put an EK heatink on that instead of the stock motherboard one. pictured above.
At the time one of the 2TBs was hitting 95'c. I was transferring a steam game install from one SSD to another. And as you can see. its still toasty at 73'c but its not hitting 95'c no more.
Ive also modified the airflow of my case a little since then so i'll be able to update with better results later. I might be able to drop that 73'c to a 70'c but its sitting paralell to the GPu so I cant be expecting 40s or 50s.
