PSA: Don't cheap out on thermal pads for your PS5 SSD upgrade

Spent $14 on a no-name thermal pad kit off Amazon last month for my PS5's SSD slot. My first load times actually got worse, then the console shut down mid-game after 45 minutes. Turns out the pad was 1mm too thick and the heatsink was barely touching. Lost the pad money plus about 2 hours pulling the whole thing apart and redoing it with a name brand 0.5mm set for $9. The cheap ones also shed little bits of gunk that stuck to the SSD connector. Anyone else run into this or got a brand that actually holds up without the markup?

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xena_kim3mo ago

Honestly, that shedding gunk thing is wild. I've never heard of a thermal pad basically disintegrating on contact like that, it sounds like something out of a horror movie for your console. And the fact that it made load times worse before it even died, that's a whole other level of frustrating. Tbh I would have been so mad I'd probably have tossed the whole PS5 out the window, you got way more patience than me. At least the name brand fix was cheaper than the junk you started with, that's some kind of messed up logic right there.

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