I'm upgrading my daughter's MacBook Pro (circa 'early 2011 edition) with an SSD. The space has room for a 9 mm high drive but the SSDs I'm considering are all 7 mm. One manufacturer includes an 'adaptor' that seems to be for this exact purpose while the other choices do not. And unfortunately the computer is not near me to just take a peek at the mount requirements. It seems possible that no adapter is needed, but I would hate to be wrong.
You can buy "adapters" on eBay for a couple bucks. Or just put a piece of foam between it and the casing. But none of that matters too much unless she abuses the laptop and will routinely be subjecting it to extreme forces. Generally you attach the drive first by sliding it into the SATA power and data connectors. This alone is enough to suspend the drive from the air, it is a good relatively tight fit. Then you use 4 screws to screw it into the chassis of the laptop. Then the cover goes on top and screws/snaps into the chassis. The extra 2mm of air really doesn't matter.
^^ Tempting to think that, but sometimes contact is used for heat transfer. The adaptor I found however appears to just be a cut-out rectangle made from plastic, so air between the chassis and the drive seems to be OK.
^ The SSD drives don't get hot like mechanical drives- no need for surface to surface heat transfer. You can use anything that's non-conductive to keep the thinner drive from shaking around- I like to use a single strip of Velcro.
Use a 2mm flatwasher as a spacer and keep the extra space for air circulation as well as a solid mount.
