Thermal Pad for NVMe SSD

[Hobby73]

As you know, NVMe SSD's run hotter than other drives.  The board contains the controller and the memory chips.  I want to apply thermal protection to my SSD boards and have the following questions (as I tend to overthink everything):

1) Should a pad be placed on both sides of the board, or only the outward facing side?

2) Should a pad be placed along the entire length of the board, or only on the controller?

3) Does a pad provide any thermal dissapation benefits when used alone, or is it only effective as a conduit between the board and a metal heat sink?

[benj38]

Commercial heat-sinks for NVMe SSD's usually have pads on both sides of the board along the whole board. However, this may be because they are meant to be universal, i.e., fit many different SSD's.

Basically, you just need the pad and heat-sink to cover the chips that get hot, which can be easily checked with a finger

The thermal pad on its own does nothing to cool the chips. It is there to displace the air between the not-perfectly-flat surfaces of the chips and the metal heat-sink.

[thm_w]

You can just get a kit on aliexpress: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006585079345.html
I don't know if this specific one will fit in all motherboards though.