Depends on the sticker many NVMe's these days have a metallic sticker on them that spreads the heat so will help improve the heat transfer when using a heatblock like in your video.

It was my impression that, on at least some drives, that "sticker" is a sheet of thermally conductive pyrolytic graphite. Pyrolytic graphite conducts heat reasonably well through its thickness but exceptionally well along its length and width. (In this specific situation pyrolytic graphite is claimed to work much better than an equally thick sheet of metal foil.) Therefore, that sticker probably won't help much, if at all, to conduct heat from the chips on the drive to a heat sink mounted on top. HOWEVER, it is intended to work as a "heat spreader", and so increase the surface area that will radiate heat if you ARE NOT using an extra heat sink. (So, rather than the chips individually getting very hot, the entire top of the "sticker" heats up and radiates heat equally.)

The right way to conduct the experiment would have been to first test both SSDs on the same system with only their stickers on (no external heatshield) as control. Then try both of them with both sticker AND external heatshield. Then remove the sticker and the external heatshield. Then only external heatshield. no sticker. Compare all four conditions on both SSDs and determine which is better.

Keep in mind that most NAND flash chips are only rated to operate up to a temperature of 70C. They don't have the heat tolerance that (for example) CPU's do. I think most people are used to thinking about the maximum operating temperature of PC components as the Tj Max of a CPU die (~100-105C), but NAND flash is slightly different! You will also notice a decrease in the lifespan of your drive if you continually operate it outside of the tolerances specified in the datasheets.

My hunch was they'd never put those stickers on the SSDs if they were noticeably affecting heat transfer, so I never considered taking them off anyway.

The short answer: if you peel your ssd’s sticker it will be 5~3c° cooler

Be careful guys, I bought Kingston SKC3000, which "fainted" during SW install (90 GB extended VS), a day after the purchase (SDD disappeared from the BIOS). When I raised the case to the Kingston technical support, just to see if there is some workaround, to avoid disassembling heatsink and CPU cooler, RMA, and new SW installation, I naively mentioned that I installed SSD under heavy heatsink and removed both protective stickers (referring to the foil over heatsink thermal pads). After that, support technician franticly declared that I voided the warranty, thinking that I removed "warranty void if removed" BS. Luckily, I already sent, SSD's both side photo, to the other guy in technical support and "gotcha you" guy backed off. If vendors want their stickers to be there, clearly raising product temperature and therefore number of broken products and RMA, let them, while product is under the warranty. Later you can remove that nonsense.

Put mine back on again after watching this video and reading some of the comments about failures. However I really doubt those failures were caused by an absence of the sticker. Correlation doesn't always imply causation. My actions are probably based on the irrational paranoia a person feels after they've done a new build and are anxious whether they've done everything correctly.

I think this was a lucky test because generally they start to throttle "after" 75C. In your case, none of them exceeded that temperature. Or maybe there was a minimal throttling to stop the second one at 75C level and that went unnoticed in the test.

The issue here is: the controller chips needs to be cooled, the NANDs need to be warmed for best performance - the metal "stickers" therefore spread the heat - so let it be (good M2 modules even don't need additional coolers on top)

It should be noted that in 1976 a federal law was passed In the U.S. that actually makes it illegal for a manufacturer to void your warranty because of the removal of a sticker. But because it's very rarely challenged or taken to court & there isn't much enforcement they get away with just doing it to reduce the # of referbishes & warranty claims. One of the original implementations of voiding before the law was passed was for "Glass-cap-chips" a type of IC (Integrated Circuit) that was essentially the start of the modern re-flash-able motherboard bios. These chips had a see-through glass window in them that when the chip inside was exposed to UV light it switched from a read-only to writable state, allowing you to flash it. The advent of florescent bulbs (like the kind in most schools/businesses @ the time) could make them writable- which prevented them from running the device they were in; while being in the writable state. In addition, Mercury- vapor, halogen bulbs, & sunlight could permanently damage them or separate the wires from the carriage to the chip. Also as IC's advanced their was phased out fairly quickly. Many had a foil backed- "Warranty Void if Removed" sticker over the top of the window to prevent accidental exposure. If you were to sue a company over it nowadays it's likely they would just shove $$$ into somebody's pocket to get it dismissed. But assuming that didn't happen the burden of proof would be on the company to prove that removing it somehow damaged the unit. Which of course means that because removing the sticker does no damage to the actual functionality of the unit itself- neither to the hardware or software- they would have to provide falsified evidence of that & lie about it. As an example; some years back there was a court case about people sending Xbox units in to Microsoft for repair & some of these units had been modded (usually to add more system ram to improve performance) & although they were still within the warranty time period & were not being sent back because of a mod related issue; Microsoft usually tried to make up some excuse as to why they wouldn't fix them. Eventually there was a lawsuit & the court decided that because the owner of the device consented to the mod, & because after purchase the device belonged to them, they were able to authorize it, & because Microsoft could not prove that the mods did any actual damage to the systems the court said Microsoft was bound by it's warranty agreement to honor any repair even if the sticker had been removed as long as it was still within the warranty time period. It's one of the few landmark cases that a big tech company lost.

Thank you so much for making this video. It's crazy how complicated and counterintuitive modern PCs are

My system board has coolers for the NVMe drives that say to remove the top sticker, put the system board's sticker on it, add the thermal pad that came with the system board, and then put the heat sink on top. I tested with both the stock sticker and the one that came with the system board, and using the recommended sticker that came with the system board resulted in a 4 degree C drop using the system board's sticker. I'm not sure what exactly in the sticker that came with the system board, but it definitely works!

I often wondered about this as all the nvme drives ive owned have Always had the sticker on the component side of the pcb - when the back is totally blank and a much better spot of stickers.

On my Corsair MP 700, I peeled off the sticker and not a single problem to date. I agree that it is always best to refer to the manual aswell. On mine, step #1 is to peel off the front label on the SSD and it doesn't void my warranty so long as you safely remove it with heatgun or something and store it inside of the factory box.

Didn’t know I needed to know the answer to this. But glad I know now. Preciate it. 👍🏼

I always peel off mine. Even though they say it is thermal conductive and heat transfers through many of the stickers. Plus you can pull the sticker off in such a way as to put it back on if you have a warranty issue. Just keep the sticker in the box that it came in.

Leaving the sticker on is better for reselling

I bought a Kingston NV2 M.2 NVMe Gen 4 1TB and the sticker just peeled right off when I opened the packaging so I just assumed it should be off.

Keep in mind that the stickers usually have aluminum or copper cores. While the controller runs better at lower temperatures and is prone to thermal throttling, NAND flash actually runs BETTER under a decent bit of heat. So the goal of the sticker is to transfer heat way from the controller and onto the NAND to maximize performance. The big heatsinks emphasize cooling the controller, but possibly over-cool the NAND. This isn't a significant enough issue to worry about, and the controller is going to be your bottleneck anyway. But I believe there's even a wear improvement from warm NAND. I want to say that the higher entropy (ie "fuzzier electrons" if it's easier to picture) makes it easier for electrons to tunnel through to the floating gates, reducing the voltage that they reach before actually jumping, and thus reducing the wear on the gate isolation barriers. But that's just a vague armchair hypothesis.

I think this video clearly demonstrates that stickers are unnecessary layer between the heat source - chips - and thermal pads.

Should you, that depends, Some of the stickers on NVMe SSD's are actually thin copper heat spreaders (Samsung 980 Pro) others are just paper. If you are going to use the heatsinks on the motherboards than removing the sticker (paper or copper) won't matter. Its more of if you put them into carrier cards that this will become and issue if you remove a heat spreader

I think it voids warranty but I've always done it because I wasn't sure if it was made of foil or not. Sorry posted this before starting the video and you covered everything.

I'm just a noob compared to most, but seeing as the internals work more efficiently while warm. Wouldn't it be best to leave the stickers on? So that the temperature drop is more moderate rather than extreme?

Those are some pretty high temps, but I guess maybe that's normal. My PNY CS3140 idles at around 45 degrees C I've noticed, under no, or light load. Under medium use like playing a game, I've noticed it gets up around 60 degrees. It doesn't seem to slow it down much though, I usually get close to the advertised 7500MB per second read speeds. However my PCI-X 3.0 Samsung 970 Evo, idles at around 30 degrees C, under load it goes to about 47 degrees. I guess the PCI-x 4.0 drives run a good bit hotter. I would get a heatsink for my Pny drive, but I don't think my giant Gaming X Trio 4070 leaves enough room to put one, it would be close.

If you ask me, i would imagine the MANUFACTURER who literally put that sticker on there knows a shitload about their product and has put it there for a specific reason. It could be made of special materials designed to help optimize its performance in conjunction with whatever its used with.

Often improved ventilation, else thermal transfer between component & the surrounding air environ, strongly influenced by surface area factor. Heatsink design using fins likely improve performance of lesser materials.

Would be interesting to see without heat sink to see how the temperature behaves. With mine it doesn't appear to make solid contact with the heatsink compound. If it's the same with yours, there might be no difference since the contact with the heat sync was poor to begin with.

I got a lexar 4TB and it's at 45c on idle Im bit worried or is it normal? my case has good ventilation

I had a dilemma, with my r7 5700x build, bear in mind I have never built any modern components, a few replacements and old builds but I had never experienced m.2. I got a adata ledg 800 pictured with a gold fancy sticker, however when it came the "sticker" was a heat sink but my b550 tomahawk also came with a heat sink. I went with the in box sink looks good and temp have been 44 max. I was worried about temps but once a sink is stuck I didn't fancy trying to peel it off.

Love you man... I was just wondering what to do about this 🙌🙌

Thank you! I was worried that I left mine on, and what it will do.

as a bit of rant I sincerely wonder why do they void the warranty based on a removed sticker that is not even a temper proof sticker. It is not like anyone can proof I have peeled it off and reapplyed it without ridiculous amount of effort, and it is not like they don't have serial on everything except the tiny passives (so they can totally tell if I have changed anything on board) I am not even offended for performance reason but rather because some of those stickers are so ugly that it brothers me to know it is in my machine

You can also buy copper tape and use that in lieu of the original sticker. (in case you peeled the original one off)

Thanks for this video! It realy helped me not testing it myself :D

looking through comments, it appears the weird bagged foam thing on my nvme was graphite, the product page didn't show it so i bought a big bolt on heat sink, waste of money if i didn't use it, might work better as it is now, without the wrinkly thing.

I've ran the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis on this one as well, and the difference is negligible. (IIRC, somewhere on the order of like 0.03 C difference? Something like that.) Given the thickness of the sticker (and if you REALLY want to be specific, the thickness of the layer of adhesive, and then the thickness of the layer of paper for the sticker itself), the ability (or inability) for that thin film of glue and thin sheet of paper is not an significant barrier to the heat transfer from the SSD (NAND flash cells and the controller) to any thermal management solution, whether it is just natural, convective cooling, or forced, convective cooling, or whether you've added a NVMe aluminum heatsink to it. From the heat transfer perspective, the sticker is functionally irrelevant. The more important think would be for you to add thermal pads over the individual components (don't just cut one long strip to cover everything, actually take the time to cut individual rectangles for the individual components), and then add said aluminum heatsink, and you're good to go. I'll have to dig up my CFD results for those that may be interested.

Still didn't see a test if we should take this off when using heatsink+thermalpad.

Most stickers are actually heat sinks anymore, i tried to remove 980 sticker it was just breaking apart not plastic at all something else. So i left it alone😁

I've got WD BLACK SN770 and I'm wondering if I need to cover whole stick or just the controller up near the pins/notch

Removed the sticker on the front of my 980 pro,the one with the controller facing up,not the copper one that's on the back.And then applied a thermal pad and a heatsink on top of it. Before the ssd under heavy load was sometimes in the mid 80's,i'm talking celsius,above the 70 degrees celsius max temp specified by Samsung. Now the max temp i saw was 72-73 celsius after stressing the ssd.

Kingston Renegade Fury states that the sticker IS a conductive carbon pad.

An acer one i just got had a sticker falling off, and those void warranty stickers are illegal. I tore it off because it was clearly a cheap plastic sticker, literally falling off...

Removing the sticker allows you to download up to 55 GBs of Ram

Do the heat sinks have a sticker on them that need peeled too? The heat sink on my MOBO's m.2 slot had blue plastic .. I bet it should have removed that.. :(

A forma correta é utilizar uma câmera de infravermelho com detector de temperatura para vermos a real diferença a olho nú.

In some country where after sales service is bad 😅😅and its almost same performance so I don't think I will do it but it was a helpful video thanks

It voids your warrenty but I did it anyways, then my ssd died 6 months later... had to glue it on and got a replacement 😂 Place I got it from has breat service, so I actually upgraded to a better ssd with dram and paid the small difference, with a discount

can you replace the heatspreader with kapton tape?

Nope some help in cooling.

Hello PP ! I bought a ROG Maximus Hero Z790 and on the motherboard, there are 3 nvme locations. Can I put 3 of them on the board ?

Ty provoked prawn I literally just had the exact same drive arrive today for my new pc build and I'm like should I take this sticker off for better thermal conductivity and I was like idk it might void the warranty so I was like better ask youtube and there you where literally two fucking days ago thanks man much appreciation 👍😎

I haven't peeled em yet (also on the mobo) only because I may have had to swap motherboard.

According to writing on label, removing it voids warranty.

I peeled off and installed more effective heat spreader on all my devices.

Shouldn't, i believe it's thermally conductive. If you have a heatsink on ur Mobo i don't think it matters. Btw those warranty void stickers, at least in the US are illegal.

Thank you for this 👊

i removed the sticker on a corsair and it failed a few months later :(

Interesting results

The provide prawn? What? I think you said your name wrong

i contacted WD regarding this and they said that warranty will be VOID if you remove the sticker

does anyone sell an aftermarket version of that NVME latch shown on that motherboard? why do the others use screws? LATCH FTW!

I put extra stickers on.

Anyone ever try an electronic cooler? Very inexpensive and I ordered one so I will see.

Some SSDs use copper stickers which act as tiny heatspreader.

Thanks for the video.

You don't want to rip off anything that has SN labeled on it. Yeah maybe it can lower the lifespan of your drive gradually but it's not drastic. People swear like they don't upgrade every couple years anyways.

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I hate stickers, I always rip them off and put heatsinks or coolers.

Would you just simply tell us a yes or no?

Mine peeled itself off by melting the glue

What do you mean no difference!? It did clearly made a difference. According to your measurements its better to keep the sticker on.

I do it for better thermals for heat sinks just the one on the chip side .

This is the wrong way of doing it. You're supposed to remove the sticker and use thermal paste like Noctua which can transfer heat better than the cheap thermal pads.

Just remove them off with a sharp scraper so it doesn't damage the sticker, and the glue itself, then transfer the sticker to a tape plastic and you'll be good. Make sure the scraper is very sharp and clean though

New experiment: Should you ADD another sticker for increased cooling performance? 😛

mine melted after years of use

An understanding of physics should relate that for any temperature to exist it must possess an mass that is that without any substance temperature cannot exist or be transferred and the simple mass of the sticker does in fact do two things firstly it allows heat to transfer from the drive and secondly to dissipate ...its false logic to expect the drive to run cooler without the sticker when it fact it could just as easily run hotter after the mass is reduced meaning what heat is generated is held on an more minimal medium. .only if the sticker has an insulting property will heat dissipation not be allowed to occur but its likely the sticker will utilise non insulting materials and adhesives....the sticker is in all probability just another thermal instrument included to not only contain information but enhance the drives capabilities don't you understand that millions of stickers don't come cheap and manufacturers don't waste there valuable resources they have research and development engineers but does the consumer have this much resource and capability well of course he doesn't. Keep the part in its intended fashion and don't think you can get ahead of the manufacturer on every point at least to be fair on every item that is as some modifications are an improvement whilst others are clearly not....

Thank you for making this video! It's very helpful specially for us who are getting started in how to improve our pc's.

Usually use my cheap ass kingston 500gb nvme storage for games. Using for more than a year now with no heatsink at all and I only get max 51°C

Nice video.

Remove the sticker and it will void the warranty.

Most of the time those stickers act As a heat spreader In some cases you might see this but in others it’s not that noticeable Looking at the results of your test this seems to be for the case for sn850 while not looking like it does

No. Don't. Its a thermal thingy i think.

3:50 interesting

Ah yes. Science.

NO NO. WD refused my RMA request because i peeled it off.

Warranty void.

thank you for doing this test for us so we don't have to 🙂

It helps alot on the cheap Kingston drives. That sticker actually blocks the thermal pad from transfering the heat completely, laughable.

Should you pee?

Useless test. Test with and without a radiator...

Bruh sounds like nigel from the wild thornberries lol