Are SSD without dram fine to use for os and just to keep 1 or 2 games in it?

[MOSTWANTEDmw97]

So I'm buying a new ssd for my pc and the prices are really high I'm thinking to buy a crucial P2 500 gb nvme m.2 SSD it's under my budget but it don't have a d-ram cache I've heard that SSD without d-ram have less life expectancy and are slow , all i wanna do is install windows in the SSD and keep some games on it (mostly 3) , speed of the SSD isn't a concern but the life expectancy is ... Well i really want my SSD to live at least 5+ years ...

So is getting this SSD fine???

[Mark Kaine]

No. it'll eventually slow down your whole pc (within a year or so)

 

idk the crucial mx500 with dram cost only like 5-10 bucks more than the bx500 without dram... seems to be a weird place to save money, imho.

[MOSTWANTEDmw97]

8 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

No. it'll eventually slow down your whole pc (within a year or so)

 

idk the crucial mx500 with dram cost only like 5-10 bucks more than the bx500 without dram... seems to be a weird place to save money, imho.

Bro in India the price difference is literally 60+$

[Mark Kaine]

4 minutes ago, MOSTWANTEDmw97 said:

Bro in India the price difference is literally 60+$

Ah, that sucks. Still ssd without dram cache isn't reliable at all unfortunately. 

[ZetZet]

19 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

No. it'll eventually slow down your whole pc (within a year or so)

M.2 NVME without DRAM is always going to be faster than SATA drive with DRAM, where are you pulling this knowledge from?

[porina]

For reads they are fine. They can be slower in writes though. You can feel the difference during Windows Updates and if you're installing game patches.

 

Life expectancy should still be fine. I have a P1 in my laptop as a gaming drive only. The P2 has higher endurance so should last longer than that. Also it looks like the P2 supports HMB so it is kinda in between with and without DRAM SSDs.

[podkall]

1 minute ago, ZetZet said:

M.2 NVME without DRAM is always going to be faster than SATA drive with DRAM, where are you pulling this knowledge from?

My Windows SSD has 30TBW less than what the OP's SSD in question..

[porina]

2 minutes ago, ZetZet said:

M.2 NVME without DRAM is always going to be faster than SATA drive with DRAM, where are you pulling this knowledge from?

Not always. Sequential speeds over NVMe may be much higher, but random speeds will depend more on the performance of the SSD. A high end SATA SSD will beat a value NVMe drive there.

[ZetZet]

1 minute ago, porina said:

Not always. Sequential speeds over NVMe may be much higher, but random speeds will depend more on the performance of the SSD. A high end SATA SSD will beat a value NVMe drive there.

Okay, but why would that lead to the drive dying in a year? That's just not happening. 

 

This DRAMless paranoia is getting out of hand seriously. New NVME drives without DRAM are all performing as good as the older drives with DRAM. 

[Mark Kaine]

5 minutes ago, ZetZet said:

M.2 without DRAM is always going to be faster than SATA drive with DRAM,

not necessarily, because it can get *really* slow after a while.  it'll still work but much slower than a spinning drive even, that's why good ssds have dram cache to begin with. 

 

This isnt a oh i read some paid reviews issue, this is a real long term issue. 

 

[porina]

7 minutes ago, ZetZet said:

Okay, but why would that lead to the drive dying in a year? That's just not happening. 

I didn't say that, only replying to your specific statement as given.

 

7 minutes ago, ZetZet said:

This DRAMless paranoia is getting out of hand seriously. New NVME drives without DRAM are all performing as good as the older drives with DRAM. 

I've not kept up to date with all the benchmarks, but HMB does seem to be filling in the gap allowing DRAM-less SSDs attain higher performance than before.

[ZetZet]

48 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

not necessarily, because it can get *really* slow after a while.  it'll still work but much slower than a spinning drive even, that's why good ssds have dram cache to begin with. 

 

This isnt a oh i read some paid reviews issue, this is a real long term issue. 

 

You are straight up the only person that has ever claimed this that I have seen, and I tried looking it up. And for it to be slower than a HDD? What? Can you show me where you have seen this?

[NobleGamer]

2 hours ago, ZetZet said:

You are straight up the only person that has ever claimed this that I have seen, and I tried looking it up. And for it to be slower than a HDD? What? Can you show me where you have seen this?

Me too, but while you were asking @Mark Kaine for a source that he wouldn't provide, I Googled OP's model of desired SSD, and Tom's Hardware said something similar for that specific SSD:

 

Quote

We've written an investigation into that matter [of swapping out QLC for TLC], which you can read here, with our results showing that the 'new' drives are nearly four times slower at transferring files than the original, read speeds are half as fast in real-world tests, and sustained write speeds have dropped to USB 2.0-like levels of a mere 40 MBps. That’s slower than most hard drives.

Before Mark says told you so, I want to caveat that not all DRAM-less SSDs have this poor of sustained write speeds. They need to be benchmarked to be sure.

 

3 hours ago, MOSTWANTEDmw97 said:

I'm thinking to buy a crucial P2 500 gb nvme m.2 SSD it's under my budget but it don't have a d-ram cache I've heard that SSD without d-ram have less life expectancy and are slow

Because of the above, I do not recommend P2 due to its weak sustained speeds, and on principle since they swapped parts without changing model number.

"Life expectancy" can be measured in warranty years and TBW. P2's TBW is 300 for a 500GB drive with 5 years.

 

I would instead recommend Silicon Power A60 (aka P34A60) which has the same TBW and better advertised & tested speeds, as well as being one of the cheapest mid range dram-less nvme drives (in US according to PCPP): https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/silicon-power-p34a60-m2-nvme-ssd

 

What's interesting is that the A60's TBW scales higher at 1 TB size than the P2.

[Mark Kaine]

57 minutes ago, NobleGamer said:

not all DRAM-less SSDs have this poor of sustained write speeds. They need to be benchmarked to be sure.

this isnt even the main issue,  it's that these drives can exhibit severe *long term* issues , especially the cheap ones, that drives with dram dont. probably also something to do with the controller.  Kingston a400 are infamous for that for example. 

 

which is why i generally advise against ssds without dram cache, crucial makes really good cheap drives with dram for example,  so i really don't see the point. 

 

maybe the newer ones with hbm are better,  but that needs also extensive research and long-term testing,  which most reviews certainly don't provide (for somewhat obvious reasons) 

[NobleGamer]

53 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

it's that these drives can exhibit severe *long term* issues , especially the cheap ones, that drives with dram dont.

And where else can we learn about this online?

 

There's no doubt that the controller can make a big difference in performance, as there's been many other cases of controller swapping within the same models. It's just that the idea of degradation over time being specific to dramless controllers is new to us.

[Mark Kaine]

30 minutes ago, NobleGamer said:

And where else can we learn about this online?

 

There's no doubt that the controller can make a big difference in performance, as there's been many other cases of controller swapping within the same models. It's just that the idea of degradation over time being specific to dramless controllers is new to us.

Google helps!

 

honestly I thought this should be common knowledge,  also I don't need the internet to know my a400 started to get *really* slow after just 6 months... we're talking 50mb/s here all while crystaldiskinfo is telling me the drive is "good".

 

Quote

Don’t go DRAM-less

One of the ways SSD vendors cut costs on their budget drives is by ditching the DRAM cache.

DRAM is important for a few reasons. The first is it holds the look-up table for the rest of the drive. Specifically, it knows exactly where on the NAND flash that your data is hiding. As a result, DRAM can dramatically improve random read and write performance.

DRAM also has the added benefit of reducing the wear on the drives. DRAM acts as a write cache, which allows the SSD controller to spread data more evenly across the NAND memory cells. This is called wear leveling, and as its name suggests it's designed to prevent memory cells from wearing out earlier than others. You can think of it like rotating your tires.

Unfortunately, in some cases DRAM-less SSDs can actually perform worse than a spinning hard disk, making them a poor choice for a boot drive.

This mostly applies to older, slower SATA-based SSDs like Western Digital’s WD Green drives or Crucial’s BX500 series

 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/ramblingpolymath.com/2021/07/be-wary-of-cheap-hard-drives-and-ssds/amp/

 

... couldn't have written it any better myself tbh... 

 

So yeah, maybe hbm helps (unknown to me) but generally dramless is not worth it because you're gonna pay twice, especially with the cheap ones

 

 

[ZetZet]

8 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

Google helps!

 

honestly I thought this should be common knowledge,  also I don't need the internet to know my a400 started to get *really* slow after just 6 months... we're talking 50mb/s here all while crystaldiskinfo is telling me the drive is "good".

 

 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/ramblingpolymath.com/2021/07/be-wary-of-cheap-hard-drives-and-ssds/amp/

I mean did you read the article? 

 

>This mostly applies to older, slower SATA-based SSDs like Western Digital’s WD Green drives or Crucial’s BX500 series.

 

Doesn't apply to relatively new NVME based SSDs. The controllers are way smarter these days and the lack of DRAM is much less of an issue, if at all.

[Ralf]

20 hours ago, ZetZet said:

M.2 NVME without DRAM is always going to be faster than SATA drive with DRAM, where are you pulling this knowledge from?

In your dream dude. Crucial P2 QLC sustained write speeds can drop to USB 2.0-like levels of a mere 40 MBps. Idk what the source of your knowlegde, but it's not as reliable as you think. Like you are not even aware that M.2 is just a form factor and they make "sata" and NVMe ssd's in that form factor. Like you believe that the MX500 2.5" is sata and the MX500 M.2 in NVMe.

https://www.tomshardware.com/features/crucial-p2-ssd-qlc-flash-swap-downgrade

[ZetZet]

24 minutes ago, Ralf said:

In your dream dude. Crucial P2 QLC sustained write speeds can drop to USB 2.0-like levels of a mere 40 MBps.

It's bad compared to other NVME SSDs. Compared to hard drives though? 

 

25 minutes ago, Ralf said:

Like you believe that the MX500 2.5" is sata and the MX500 M.2 in NVMe.

Where are you pulling that from?

 

P2 is a budget SSD and it's not something I would put in my recommended list, but it's still an NVME SSD so it's not going to become useless after a year as the other person claimed, it has nothing to do with DRAM either. The flash itself is slow and the downgraded version only has a 24GB cache so it slows down to snail speed after that, but how often you do actually move that many files? 

 

Not to mention it also makes no sense to recommend SATA SSDs to someone looking at NVME drives, just recommend a better NVME drive.