Can you harm an SSD by using it without the casing?

[gus6464]

Upon opening an 840 EVO the actual SSD is half the size of the casing. If you have a laptop that can accommodate a 5mm height SSD max would there be any long term effects to installing the SSD without the casing?

 

[code65536]

A mSATA SSD has no casing.

 

[corkyg]

And the new SanDIsk U100 series, designed for ultra-thin notebooks is 3.5mm cased.
http://www.sandisk.com/about-sandis...s-(ssd)-for-tablets-and-ultra-thin-notebooks/

 

[mrpiggy]

The biggest issue likelyhood of issues with not using a case on an SSD is static discharge and/or grounding/shorting. NAND is very sensitive to ESD. So if you go shuffling your feet across your rug in winter and then shock your bare SSD, you are "very" likely to do some serious damage to it (or any other electronics). Likewise, if you have your SSD attached and running and it manages to short itself against your case frame or something, like any other piece of electronics, it is likely to get damaged.

With "consumer" SSD's the only other long-term issue is heat. While it is true that MSATA and M2 drive formats have no cases, they are also designed with much more aggressive thermal throttling characteristics to deal with both heat and power consumption during usage. With standard format drives, chances are slim that running without a case is going to cause any heat-caused reliability issues in normal usage as long as external temperatures are not extreme, however the SSD case is also generally used as a heatsink to the controller and/or NAND with many high-performance drives to help manage heat when external environments are more extreme.

In your laptop, chances are running a bare drive will not have any "heat" issues. It however it might have "mechanical" issues without case. The SATA connector is not very strong. Simply hanging a bare SSD off it without any form of mechanical support normally provided by a case can cause the SSD to back off or break the connector, or flex it enough to short against something else inside with the laptop's movement. If you are going to just use a bare drive, make sure it is supported well and can't short against anything.