Would you rather use a SATA SSD with DRAM or a NVMe SSD with no DRAM as boot drive?

[Newblesse Obblige]

I was planning to build a PC a year ago but I still don't have a budget and now my plan has been delay because of high prices and low stock of the parts I planned to buy.
But I will still ask this anyway so I know what I will pick when the prices and stock are now ok.
I see people don't recommend DRAM-less SSDs because of life span issue but does it really matter for a casual user to use a DRAM-less SSD as boot drive even if it is a NVMe SSD?

[WhitetailAni]

SATA SSD with DRAM.

I don't see SATA going away until SSDs have more storage than HDDs for about the same price, so in 10 years?

[AbydosOne]

NVMe w/o DRAM. Some drives have HMB (Host Memory Buffer) which basically uses the system memory for the drives DRAM (it's not perfect, but it's better than nothing).

[Newblesse Obblige]

Just now, AbydosOne said:

NVMe w/o DRAM. Some drives have HMB (Host Memory Buffer) which basically uses the system memory for the drives DRAM (it's not perfect, but it's better than nothing).

I was going add with HBM but i think not all DRAM-less NVMe SSDs have HBM. correct me if im wrong

[Electronics Wizardy]

Id probalby go nvme without dram. Normally faster speeds in most tests. Look at tests here https://www.anandtech.com/show/16504/the-samsung-ssd-980-500gb-1tb-review/2

 

The dramless ssds are faster in almost all uses, esp those of consumer workloads.

 

I also haven't seen any evidence of signifanty shorter lifespan of dramless ssds, they should all last longer than there usable for.

 

Sata seems to be going away pretty quickly now for ssds. Most new systems have nvme ssds as no reason to go sata. Sata will stick around for a while for hdds and legacy systems, but in a new system there isn't much of a reason to get a sata drive.

[Newblesse Obblige]

3 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

I also haven't seen any evidence of signifanty shorter lifespan of dramless ssds, they should all last longer than there usable for.

I was planning to buy a DRAM-less SATA SSD back then because I just want to speed up my PC, use my HDD boot drive as a storage, and save some money. Plus I didnt this it matter back then
maybe DRAM-less SATA SSDs are the one they are referring to or it doesn't matter? 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, Newblesse Obblige said:

I was planning to buy a DRAM-less SATA SSD back then because I just want to speed up my PC, use my HDD boot drive as a storage, and save some money. Plus I didnt this it matter back then
maybe DRAM-less SATA SSDs are the one they are referring to or it doesn't matter? 

Yea dramless ssds aren't great, but there still a lot better than hdds in almost all uses. They will be much faster for boot time, program loading and most other uses.

 

I have yet to see evidence that they have huge failure rates, yea there worse than high end ssds, but seems simmilar or better than hdds.

[NewMaxx]

Depends. The DRAM-less SN550 is usually superior to a SATA SSD, for example. NVMe drives have access to HMB in most cases (if DRAM-less) and the protocol has lower latency and higher bandwidth available to it as well. There have been some awful DRAM-less NVMe drives, though, and they can be slow under certain workloads, although generally as a secondary issue to their flash (e.g. QLC) or SLC cache design (e.g. large cache and a fuller drive). The SN550 supports HMB but doesn't need it (large SRAM) plus has static SLC and 96L TLC for good overall performance in 99% of consumer usage even when fuller, for example.

[mythic540]

On 3/29/2021 at 9:19 AM, NewMaxx said:

Depends. The DRAM-less SN550 is usually superior to a SATA SSD, for example. NVMe drives have access to HMB in most cases (if DRAM-less) and the protocol has lower latency and higher bandwidth available to it as well. There have been some awful DRAM-less NVMe drives, though, and they can be slow under certain workloads, although generally as a secondary issue to their flash (e.g. QLC) or SLC cache design (e.g. large cache and a fuller drive). The SN550 supports HMB but doesn't need it (large SRAM) plus has static SLC and 96L TLC for good overall performance in 99% of consumer usage even when fuller, for example.

See this is exactly what I want to get to the bottom of. I have the 500gb sn550 as a boot drive right now and my concern is that it wont last me as long as i thought it would. over the past year i've had it, its been through 8.4TB of the 300TBW and is now at 99.0%, even though my pc doesnt seem to be slower but I haven't measured it in any meaningful way.  All i do is game, browse the web, move movies and other game files around my drives as needed, etc.( I wanna mention the fact that I play games like warzone where there seems to be an large update always been written to my hdd but I dont know if that matters or not).  I'm wondering if I fall under the category of someone that would benefit from a new nvme with dram. The drive is about 25% filled up but i only have my os and main programs on it, no games or movies or anything like that. I have a 2TB 7200 hdd as storage for all that but I want to add more with sata since I only have one m.2 slot. Would it be worth it to just upgrade my boot drive to something with dram and bigger capacity? The only reason I'd like to avoid that is to not have to do a clean install of everything since its so time consuming so if using that sn550 wont be a problem anytime soon then I'd rather get a 2TB sata ssd with dram instead and then later on upgrade my main boot drive if it starts slowing down to much for me. Any tips on which one I should go with?

[AbydosOne]

8 minutes ago, mythic540 said:

Any tips on which one I should go with?

Tip 1) Don't necro posts. Make new questions if the original post was more than a week or two old.

 

8 minutes ago, mythic540 said:

its been through 8.4TB of the 300TBW and is now at 99.0%

In a year? You've got more than 30 years of life left on it at that rate. If it isn't causing any sort of performance issue or reliability problem, don't worry about it. TBW ratings are a minimum for warrantee purposes, not a maximum for absolute lifetimes; most drives can well exceed their rating.

[mythic540]

23 minutes ago, AbydosOne said:

Tip 1) Don't necro posts. Make new questions if the original post was more than a week or two old.

 

In a year? You've got more than 30 years of life left on it at that rate. If it isn't causing any sort of performance issue or reliability problem, don't worry about it. TBW ratings are a minimum for warrantee purposes, not a maximum for absolute lifetimes; most drives can well exceed their rating.

Sorry bout that, I had just finished reading NewMaxx's last post and wanted to just ask about my use case. The research i've done on my sn550 is mostly good but there's a lot of posts out there mentioning the lack of dram eventually becoming an issue. I mainly wanted to know how much of a power user you needed to be for that to even matter. if that sn550 is all i need for my boot drive then i'm ok with that since I can just add an extra ssd now. Thanks for clearing that up, i know this topic has been beaten to death but there's just a lot to read out there about it.