My nvme was getting a bit warm at 76C under a stress test. I ordered 4 heat sinks from China. Two arrived today. One was way too small for the nvme, the other was a very thin piece of copper with a thick piece of foam and a couple of rubber bands to hold it all together. Waiting on the other two before makig a decision.
Heat sinks for NVMe drives are so small, because those are usually located next to or sometimes even under the GPU. There is simply not enough space on most computer motherboards for desktops. For laptops there is usually not enough space in the chassis for a proper heat sink.
Now, in case there is space, I expect a homelabber to have spare parts from other computers. Over the years I have collected quite a few aluminium and copper CPU heatsinks. These could be adjusted to fit a NVMe drive. Might even be possible to actively cool it.
Janky junk solution? Absolutely. But if it works, your NVMe drive drive will not die from “heat death” before “write death” happens.
I purchased a couple heat sinks a year ago that had black bands and eventually they broke. I found some latex bands on Amazon that have held up well the last 18 months. Also I just did a short comparison and I found that the aluminum with black coating didn’t work as well as the pure copper with black graphite coating. The price was similar between the aluminum and copper. The copper ones came with clear bands which I didn’t try since I have a large bag of latex bands. Also the key thing to remember is airflow. The NVMe’s run a lot cooler in my servers because of the fans keeping air movement over the heat sinks. The desktop tower case I have doesn’t have the air flow like my servers do so I have a small 25mm Noctua fan blowing on that heat sink. Noctua’s are spendy but some come with adapters that reduce the RPM’s plus Noctua fans generally are quieter if noise is an issue for you.