[SOLVED] Wet mSATA SSD in Intel NUC

[jeffst]

I installed an mSATA SSD Samsung EVO 860 in my Intel NUC and did not remove the sticker. Now I notice that condensation is appearing between the SSD and the heat-dissipating foam. Is that normal?

 

[Darkbreeze]

Not only is it not normal, it shouldn't even be possible.

 

[jeffst]

Not only is it not normal, it shouldn't even be possible.

In another forum I was told that this is silicon oil from the thermal pad. I have now removed the thermal pad from my Intel Nuc d54250wyk and the temperature is 31 degrees celsius on idle (approx 6 degrees higher as before). Do I need a new thermal pad?

 

[Darkbreeze]

Ok, well oil is not condensation, but I can certainly see how they'd look similar. I'd much rather see oil on my electronics than water, LOL.

How old is the pad you have? If it's a common occurence, I might look at different solutions. Not sure WHAT those solutions might be, but surely it can't be acceptable to have oil oozing out onto your hardware. Never really worked with an NUC system yet so I haven't encountered this problem and I've NEVER seen this issue with any mSATA M.2 drives I've installed in laptops but I've also never taken them back apart to look for oil leaks. Since it's not a car I didn't figure I needed to. Heh.

 

[jeffst]

Ok, well oil is not condensation, but I can certainly see how they'd look similar. I'd much rather see oil on my electronics than water, LOL.

How old is the pad you have? If it's a common occurence, I might look at different solutions. Not sure WHAT those solutions might be, but surely it can't be acceptable to have oil oozing out onto your hardware. Never really worked with an NUC system yet so I haven't encountered this problem and I've NEVER seen this issue with any mSATA M.2 drives I've installed in laptops but I've also never taken them back apart to look for oil leaks. Since it's not a car I didn't figure I needed to. Heh.

The pad is 5 yo. Here you can find a pic of it: https://ibb.co/0qvLHsJ

What do you think about this kind of cooler? http://

 

[Darkbreeze]

Are you doing a lot of extended writes to the drive? Sustained sequential writes of large files? If not, you might not even NEED to put a cooler on there.

I think that type of cooler MIGHT be ok though if you need one. I'm really not seeing much of anything that's better. If it were me, hell, I'd probably mod the case of the NUC to accept a 60mm fan directly on top of the mSATA drive if it was actually getting hot. LOL. Should be some kind of power adapters available for that as these things tend to have several types of available connections inside.