SSD is leaking?

[AirSimulator]

My Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus failed spectacularly yesterday. My wife was playing Assassin's Creed Origins and the game started hitching seriously and then everything froze. On reboot the system repeatedly blue screened with registry error, no code. Turns out the boot drive failed and was write-protected. Or I guess you could say the drive was "assassinated" :P. Pulling it out, it appears there's some sort of fluid on it? I haven't gotten water anywhere near the system, so my only conclusion is that two of the chips are leaking, the second one from the left, and the far right one. The other two chips have no fluid coating. The M.2 heatsink is also wet in corresponding locations with no sign of fluid anywhere else. I've seen a similar liquid film on a failed 1080Ti, but I figured the copper pipes cracked on it. Do chips bleed?

[RONOTHAN##]

Was this under one of those NVMe heatsinks on your motherboard? It looks more like thermal pad grease than anything, it shouldn't have harmed anything. Look at the SMART data for that drive, usually when it becomes write protected it's because the drive has passed a certain threshold of writes and didn't actually fail.

 

Odds are that's what was on that 1080 Ti as well. 

Edited May 20, 2022 by RONOTHAN##

[CommanderAlex]

Welcome to the forums!!

 

This "leaking" you are referring to is grease from the thermal pads. This is completely normal to happen and does not affect the components at all. 

[AirSimulator]

Ah. Makes more sense. Well, I'm going to RMA this thing, hopefully shouldn't happen again. 

[CommanderAlex]

7 minutes ago, AirSimulator said:

Ah. Makes more sense. Well, I'm going to RMA this thing, hopefully shouldn't happen again. 

Yeah, you typically see the grease come through the PCB on graphics cards where the memory chips are, and motherboards where the power delivery phases/chokes are. 

 

Best of luck with the RMA.