Ok, currently my os is installed on a 2tb nvme in the half speed m.2 I think my primary m.2 slot died or the ssd in it died, im not sure but im iffy on moving the drive to it, however with games getting bigger and my use case of the 2tb drive, I think a dedicated gaming ssd would be a good idea, I also have a near 200gb database that I could use that drive as a backup space for it too.
so in the context of games, not a boot drive, is it being dramless an issue? I have asked is some more gaming focused places but the topic gets derailed by people complaining about youtubers. im mostly wondering if there will be an issue with games that stream assets or direct drive games.
the difference between known to have dram and dram less is essentially the difference between a 2tb drive and a 4tb drive, given some of the games I am looking at playing are over 200gb and some games I would put on it are modded to over 200gb, 4tb isn’t exactly overkill.
I saw an Amazon Black Friday sale SSD show up on a couple websites.
4TB Silicon Power UD90 - $162. Now I can have ALL my serious software and games on one drive and not have to worry about space for a little while.
It is DRAMless I believe. Reviews said it was pretty good. I had a Samsung 990 Pro but my 10850K CPU bottlenecked it to half speed. gen 3 - 3,500 MB/s. I figured it was a waste to have a bottlenecked Samsung so I replaced it and sold it.
The SP-UD90 runs about the same as the 990Pro. 3,500 Reads & Writes. Your speed should be closer to 7,000MB/s with PCIe gen 4x4.
I also setup a spare SSD to be cache for my HDD. That experiment is working well too.
I think dramless drives have a worse rep than they deserve nowadays. Having dram was a bigger deal for SATA drives, and since a few years nvme drives have HBM, where they borrow some of the system memory to make up the lack of dram.
This modern dramless lexar drive for example shows excellent performance, and is probably the best (or one of the best) value SSDs out there at the moment:
good review for it, got a question if you happen to know, is the system memory stuff it does motherboard dependant or is it os dependant? I have a 370x taichi for a 1700 ryzen, it’s kind of getting up there in age, so my concern is if that doesn’t work, also if you know, how much space does it actually use? I know that samsung has 512-1gb on their drives for dram, and while I have 64gb, I frequently use all of it so it is a bit of a concern.
If the ssd has HMB (host memory buffer) enabled then you are set. There are no additional requirements. Maximum amount of used host memory should be 1GB per TB of storage, so no worries.
Just avoid extremely cheap dramless drives like Silicon Power above or worse. These are really unpredictable, both in performance, endurance and reliability.
Generally speaking the dramless drive segment, being the cheapest of the cheap, has the most variability. Top of line drive have excellent performance, satisfying even most demanding users. Trash on the bottom is literally wasted money, since they can perform worse that even hard drives when under load.
There are some horror stories around, latest one was Silicon Power SATA drive.
Gold standard for dramless drives are Samsung 980 and newish micron client ssds. Those can offer almost the same performance as top of line drives with dram from 1 or 2 gens ago.
TLDR: Be frugal, just dont be mindlessly cheap. It will cost ya.
This is my issue with DRAM-less drives, they tend to be the cheap drives, where all corners were cut to boast 4TB for 100€/$
Before I took the plunge into SSD-land, I learned the hard way why some SSDs are much more expensive per GB than others.
To hold your game library, most SSDs will be fine.
Won’t matter for games, but a high quality SSD isn’t that much more expensive. I snagged a Nextorage Japan 4TB drive (TLC, DRAM, Phison controller) for $200 last month.
well right now its 25 more than the lexar, my only main concern with it is it seems to have a customer service nightmare if anything goes wrong with it, though im looking at cheap 4tb ssds so its probably not the best from anyone.
