Host Memory Buffer SSDs (HMB)?

[CyberTrash]

What are your opinions on HMB SSDs?

Linus hasn't talked about them yet, I know he always recommends not buying DRAMless SSDs but he has never mentioned his stance on DRAMless HMB SSDs (as far as I know).

Anyway, I'm expanding my storage and I've stumbled upon Samsung's new 980 SSD, that uses HMB instead of DRAM; allocating 64 MBs of CPU's own cache to use instead.

For budgetary reasons this memory is ideal for me, but I'm hesitant as I don't know much about how good and bad these new HMB SSDs are, and whether I should trust Samsung on this one, or settle with a much slower non-Samsung DRAM SSD.

(speeds attached below, also it's TLC and 600TBW)

 

Your opinions are much welcomed. Thanks in advance.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Dramless ssds aren't a bad as many make them out to be. I have used many for boot drives, and they work fine and are much faster than hdds in almost all uses.

 

9 minutes ago, CyberTrash said:

Anyway, I'm expanding my storage and I've stumbled upon Samsung's new 980 SSD, that uses HMB instead of DRAM; allocating 64 MBs of CPU's own cache to use instead.

Id get anouther brand here, I don't see the point of the 980.

 

9 minutes ago, CyberTrash said:

For budgetary reasons this memory is ideal for me, but I'm hesitant as I don't know much about how good and bad these new HMB SSDs are, and whether I should trust Samsung on this one, or settle with a much slower non-Samsung DRAM SSD.

The non samgsung drives won't be much slower. But for most uses, any ssd will work fine, and won't have a noticable performance difference in things like bootup time.

[Chris Pratt]

It's fine. Like pretty much all things when it comes to SSDs, it depends on your usage. The DRAM allocated via HMB is typically small (64MB or less), which only allows it to cache the lookup tables to address around 64GB of the storage at once. That may not seem like a lot, but the key phrase is "at once". Even a fairly large game like a Modern Warfare, isn't generally going to need more than 50GB of its data at any given time. Obviously, though, any workload that does need to address more than 64GB of data on the drive at once is going to suffer dramatically.

 

It's slower than DRAM physically on the drive, as well, but not *that* much slower, and other optimizations can be made to make up for it.

 

I wouldn't be too concerned. Something like a 970 Evo Plus is still a better drive all around, but the 980 performs reasonably well across the board for an entry level drive, as long as your workloads aren't too extreme.