SSDs, NVMe, and DRAM cache

[Armand_Karlsen]

A lot of what I read says a DRAM-less SSD will perform like a conventional hard drive, but no NVMe SSD I've seen for sale mentions a DRAM cache in the specs. Are they an exception, or am I missing something?

[RobFRaschke]

It's not well advertised, but things like the Sabrent Rocket are DRAM-Less.

[Electronics Wizardy]

A dramless drive will be much faster than a hdd for most uses.

 

Lots of nvme drives have a dram cache, but there are some that don't and use hmb, and can have good performance still.

 

I wouldn't worry about dram too much, just look at reviews of the performance of the drive. The whole package matters a lot more than the parts used.

[Applefreak]

DRAM Cache will be important if you copy a lot of files to it every day. If not, it does not make that much of a difference. Some SSDs manufacturers have utilities that allow you to set a specific amount of RAM for write caching, which is faster than your SSDs DRAM cache. But in case of a power loss, the last written items, if not written already to the SSD, will be lost. Now with NVME, even then, the risk is pretty low given you can write at over 2 GB a second. So for example if you did some copy and pasting and later decided to start a game it would then write from the cache to the drive in seconds. And even if the game should crash, it would have been written already. Now if this were a file server / NAS, I would suggest getting a UPS with at least 20 minutes of reserve power.

[Armand_Karlsen]

23 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

A dramless drive will be much faster than a hdd for most uses.

 

Lots of nvme drives have a dram cache, but there are some that don't and use hmb, and can have good performance still.

 

I wouldn't worry about dram too much, just look at reviews of the performance of the drive. The whole package matters a lot more than the parts used.

Yeah, that makes good sense, going by reviews instead. That said, do you have any examples of NVMe SSDs that specifically do have a DRAM cache? My usual go-to places for parts don't seem to mention DRAM cache unless I dig right down into details specs for each item.

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 minutes ago, Armand_Karlsen said:

Yeah, that makes good sense, going by reviews instead. That said, do you have any examples of NVMe SSDs that specifically do have a DRAM cache? My usual go-to places for parts don't seem to mention DRAM cache unless I dig right down into details specs for each item.

most reviews should show if it has a dram cache, 

 

but really dram doesn't really matter that much for desktop uses, look for reviews instead of looking for a specific spec.

 

Drives like the 660p, 600p, 970 evo, 760p, ex920 and many others all have dram