Yeah, the brake surface is kind of narrow. My pads have about 1mm of clearance from the top and bottom of the braking surface. Funny, though, my rear brakes are totally silent. I took apart the front caliper (XT parallel push) greased the pivots and oiled everything else, put on a Salsa booster but no luck. If the ceramic pads don't work maybe I'll think about converting to disk on the front.