Are DRAMless SSDs a Deal or a Trap? — Byte Size Tech

P5 plus and kingston fury renegade (updated kc3000) are really good and priced pretty well. Surprised you didn't mention them. The p5 plus is especially good value, even the 500gb version. Dram, 176 layer flash, proven controller, hardware-based encryption. Hell, I'm using one in a gen 3 slot as an OS drive even though it's gen 4 since it's better than all the gen 3 option I had at the same price. And it saturates gen 3 so I'm not losing anything at all compared to gen 3 drives. 👍

I was wondering if a Teamgroup MP34 was a good choice. I knew Tech Deals was the place to find out.

Here’s the bottom line: your average consumer who has dealt with a slow 5400 RPM drive that is so degraded, the customer is used to showering, getting dressed and making coffee first, that customer isn’t going to care about DRAM CACHE. Instead, the customer is going to be shocked at the incredible speed increase in boot and loading times for programs and their web browser even with a DRAM-LESS SSD. Now I’m not saying go with a no name brand cheapest as you can get SSD, by all means reliability is a big factor as well. You want a quality brand such as crucial or Samsung with a good solid 3-5 year warranty and a decent TBW such as 800. But overall, a decent DRAM-LESS SSD is going to give that “wow” factor to an average consumer. I’d say if you are a gamer and more on the picky side, DRAM CACHE is for you.

dram-less is fine for a general laptop or basic machine. They key is,stop buying QLC or 256/512gb drives if you need a lifespan. There are dram chips that rise higher than the storage, so aftermarket cooling sinks don't make contact across the board. That is worrysome.

I could chose between this drive and an nm790, same price, 4tb
I just went with the nm790 but it's just for bulk storage as it compensates for slow internet here

You're best off with a decent to good drive for long term investments though, like tech always says, you can keep a drive through multiple builds.

I have Crucial MX500, two of them and i used one of them for OS. I have changed for Samsung 980 NWMe DRAM-les for OS and i think that Crucial MX500 even it's SSD is better for OS, just because have DRAM. If you have SSD with DRAM don't upgrade to DRAM-les NWMe.

Thanks for the info!

Or put it in an external enclosure.

i use p41 platinum hynix 2tb for my primary drive, im very satisfied with it (i bought it for 99€ on this years prime days). In my old system i still had sata ssd (i dont recall the name if im right it was something like crucial mx200). The difference in speed was definitely noticeable.
I picked the hynix drive since at the time it was cheaper than the other drives in its ballpark.
The nm790 lexar is a dram less drive which is competing with 980 pro ( i saw it in tech notice review a few weeks back). Dram less got better since they were introduced, modern drives with hmb are good enough for short to mid long workloads but for really extended loads with really much data a drive with dram chachd is still better.

apsolutly true i luckaly i bought 970 evo 1tb as my boot drive instead of kingston nv 1 ( i paid double for samsung but it was worth it ) its pretty decent (and i wouldnt put anything higher end as i own 9700kf 32 gb ddr4 ram ) so pcie 3.0 motherobard asus primez390 m plus. i use kingston nv 2 as game drive as games are large nowadays +4tb segate baracuda for old games mostly or like pre 2016 games maybe i made good choise with 970 evo plus samsung 1tb (boots in like 10 secs)

When looking at SSDs, do you focus on specific brands and consider their warranty and customer support? Here in Canada, Samsung is known to be notorious for being difficult and uncooperative to deal with in the event of an RMA and general customer service.

I recently purchased two Samsung 980 Pro 2TB drives on impulse because they were on sale for a good price and haven't used them yet but I'm not sure if I should return them and go for a different brand that will have better warranty and customer support.

Am I making shopping for PC parts difficult by being paranoid about stuff possibly failing or am I justified for it? So far nothing I've bought has failed but the worry never leaves.

DRAM drives are way better. Did used to have a dramless gen4 WD Black around think SN750, only had it due to it's cheapness. Also have a QLC drive that runs Linux on a spare pc. Not really good for gaming but they are okay. Large file transfers are helped by the dram cache and HDD/NVME being a better quality.

I upgraded a 2200MB/s SSD to P5 plus for my 5900X 3080Ti. For gaming, the only significant difference is in MSFS20. Not very impressive for gaming, but $90 on prime day was a good deal. For secondary drive, I'll get a cheaper team group or silicon power SSD.

During prime day, here in Italy I bought on offer, one nvme gen4 Sk Hynix p41 Platinum 2tb and two nvme gen3 Sk Hynix p31 Gold. They were cheaper than the Samsung.

I've been using the wd black sn 770 1tb for gaming and day to day web browsing for just over a year now and haven't had any issues that im aware of. The price on those cant be beat

Bought an A2000 2 years ago for my 3600 and 5600 XT setup. Sold my CPU and GPU, upgraded to a 5700x and 4070 and to an ADATA 2TB 960 Legend (Gen 4) and moved the A2000 to the secondary slot to run games from. No hiccups from my new setup. Will be using the Gen 4 for DirectStorage supported games.

I bought an sn770 1TB for $55 to replace a 512GB Silicon Power gen 3 drive, it has no DRAM, but supports HMB, and is TLC. I haven't installed it yet cause I'm lazy, but it will be a lot better than the DRAMless one I bought for $35 early last year. a cheap 4TB SATA SSD currently cost under $150, but I'd only recommend those for game drives so you can have much better than hard drive performance at a cheap price. I'd still recommend a hard drive for bulk storage if you need more than 2TB, and don't mind slower transfers though, a 4TB HDD is half the price of a 4TB SSD.

No Deal

After all this time I still dont actually know what the exact difference is. Though as prices continue to fall.
Doesnt help that sometimes its hard to tell whether the ssds have dram or not, I feel like I've made this exact same comment on a previous video or two.

With the Samsung Evo 970 Plus being so cheap, I feel that is the direct go to, especially the 2TB model. I only have gen 3 PCIe and many others do as well. That's my opinion. If you have Gen 4 get that. I like my samsung so much my next build will have it as a secondary, don't know if my dramless sata drive and 1tb 660p will be making that journey though.

ok ok Tech, slow down. Let me take down notes. You mentioned few Gen 4 SSDs too quickly. let me rewind.

Far as i can gather, if you regularly transfer larger file sizes DRAM cache matters. General day to day usage probably won't notice.

You forgot the corsair mp600 pro xt 2tb that i managed to get new for 80eu delivered 🤪🤪🤪🤪🤪🤪🤪🤪🤪

It really pisses me off when I shop around for SSDs because for some damn reason they go out of their way to hide if the drive is DRAMless or has DRAM. What the hell is wrong with these manufacturers!? This is the primary feature I look far and it's like a fucking scavenger hunt to find this crucial bit of information out. What the hell is it not listed on the spec sheet!?!?

I constantly see people posting about some cheap NVMe drive they just bought for their PC and I cringe. I try to explain the difference between the one they purchased and a better one with DRAM cache. At least for the Boot/OS drive. Many are so budget oriented they fail the understand.

Got a Kingston KC3000 2TB drive for a decent price. Very good performance at around 7GB/s in both read and write with DRAM

So you are saying that dramless drives are basically Generation Boomer drives? ...j/k

I can’t believe how cheap SSD’s are currently even the WDSN850X 2TB is only £114 which is cheap as chips. Think I paid £164 for mine last year. Building a PC right now has got to be as cheap as I can remember. GPU’s not so great I accept, but you can get an RX6700xt new for £300 in the UK and that will run almost anything on medium/high settings.

got a 4TB WD Black SN850X for games, it's freakin' glorious

I bought a dramless and QLC Crucial P3 1TB for my living room PC which I use for games which use controllers (X-Com, Aliens: Dark Descent etc). They are currently selling in England for £35 which is about $45 including VAT (sales tax). At that price it was too good to pass up.

The PC already has an Adata SX8200 Pro for the boot drive this was just additional and just has Steam game files on it. Games seem to mainly do much more reads than writes and so for the use case I don't think there's much downside here.

I use the Samsung 980 (non pro) for one of my gaming drives and it’s perfectly fine. It may not have a DRAM buffer but it does use HMB (host memory buffer). I figure unless I’m dealing with loading and off loading large sets of data everyday, then it’s just fine.

Do you guys sell merch?

Is it safe to say that it will never be good to use DRAMless? At least in the near future?

The sn770 doesn't have dram but it's meant to be a fantastic SSD? Why is this?

Personally i do get the good DRAMless drives for stuff that isnt the main PC, e.g i have nucs and laptops for select work, never going to have supremely heavy write cycles every week so it makes sense for me, i go for the Solidigm P41 plus drives, 1TB is enough for an alternate use case and it saves me £30 on the P44 pros of the same capacity, For me solidigm have been the best overall use case drive so i just stick with them for now and they are generally cheaper than most the competition in the UK and i have x2 P44 pros in the main PC

And if they dont die, ill just use them as random usb storage devices at a point when they should ideally be replaced, i like to get my moneys worth.

Ya know, you always say 'there are no bad parts, only bad prices'..... but I really feel like DRAM-less drives really are bad parts. Yeah, they're less expensive. But they also have a crippling issue that will almost certainly come up at some point, and for just $10-20 more you could get a much better drive. The price of a sandwich, as you say.

Hard pass on any DRAM-less drives, regardless of price.

It's interesting that you mention this drive is used on prebuilts. Many of these firms are looking to cut corners with components in any when they can. Following which, the unit is advertised as "pure gold."

I personally use a Kingston A2000. It is only a Gen x2. But for me as an OS drive it is the best option at the time I bought. (Halo System, 5950x, 6900xt, 640GB Kingston 3600 CL18)

Got the 980 pro 2TB for like 110 usd back in March, such a good deal

This video would be perfect as a Tier List video to add a visual component to it.

Good video guy's!

IMO if you are planning a build your 1st part to pick should be SSD. Get the best you can like a 980 pro or 990 pro 2tb. Speed and reliability.