does a dram cache realy matter?

[GamGrime69]

should i get a drive that lacks a dram cache? Im looking at the Kingston NV2 1tb cuz its cheap and pcie 4.0x4. i know that doesnt really matter but if the prices are similar why not future proof

 

i think it uses tlc nand, but should i try to get something that uses better? slc? mlc? something with an optane cache?

 

what truely matters with getting a responsive ssd?

 

my current sata ssd (sandisk ssd+ 1tb) will become unusable when something is downloading to it, and will hang a lot.

[Fasauceome]

Dram on an M.2 is slightly less important, since PCIe is so fast the SSD can actually borrow some of your system memory as cache. Although, even a cacheless SSD in my experience is not so bad for everyday usage. Few years ago I upgraded my brother's system with a really cheap SSD and it's holding strong.

[emosun]

10 minutes ago, gamagama69 said:

my current sata ssd (sandisk ssd+ 1tb) will become unusable when something is downloading to it, and will hang a lot.

have you considered just replacing the ssd with any ssd thats functional?

[PDifolco]

If you don't plan to make frequent massive file copy or such, it won't matter much

But if you do the DRAMless SSD will become very slow on huge R/W tasks

[Mark Kaine]

19 minutes ago, PDifolco said:

If you don't plan to make frequent massive file copy or such, it won't matter much

But if you do the DRAMless SSD will become very slow on huge R/W tasks

Thats pretty much my experience... 

 

although I just got a 980 which doesn't have a dram cache, i hope its not an issue for nvme drives... 

 

47 minutes ago, Fasauceome said:

Dram on an M.2 is slightly less important, since PCIe is so fast the SSD can actually borrow some of your system memory as cache. Although, even a cacheless SSD in my experience is not so bad for everyday usage. Few years ago I upgraded my brother's system with a really cheap SSD and it's holding strong.

i think what happened a lot... dram less very cheap drives that also have extremely bad memory controllers and other cheap parts... they'll just break sooner on average. 

 

my Kingston a400 worked ok for half a year, now it still works,  at 3mb/s max!

turns out these things had some of the worst controllers ever, so that is probably the issue.  crystaldisk also says "good" btw (i just wouldn't call 3mb/s good, but maybe that's just me lol)

[GamGrime69]

1 hour ago, emosun said:

have you considered just replacing the ssd with any ssd thats functional?

wait this is known issue? lmao

[GamGrime69]

37 minutes ago, PDifolco said:

If you don't plan to make frequent massive file copy or such, it won't matter much

But if you do the DRAMless SSD will become very slow on huge R/W tasks

so game downloads will real slow the system down? i have a gigabit connection  although steam usually doesnt download quite that fast

[GamGrime69]

47 minutes ago, PDifolco said:

If you don't plan to make frequent massive file copy or such, it won't matter much

But if you do the DRAMless SSD will become very slow on huge R/W tasks

also would an optane cache do anything? some used drives have poped up on ebay for okay prices

[Fasauceome]

1 hour ago, gamagama69 said:

also would an optane cache do anything? some used drives have poped up on ebay for okay prices

Do you have a Ryzen CPU? StoreMI, their own version of optane, works super well comparatively and can be configured with any SSD. 

 

As for optane's best case, I used a 64B drive alongside a 1TB hard drive for a time. In terms of general use, I was very surprised by the speed and responsiveness. Only slow disk activity were large reads and writes. Being someone who still boots a lot of games off a hard drive in my personal rig, I'm not as picky.

[GamGrime69]

16 minutes ago, Fasauceome said:

Do you have a Ryzen CPU? StoreMI, their own version of optane, works super well comparatively and can be configured with any SSD. 

 

As for optane's best case, I used a 64B drive alongside a 1TB hard drive for a time. In terms of general use, I was very surprised by the speed and responsiveness. Only slow disk activity were large reads and writes. Being someone who still boots a lot of games off a hard drive in my personal rig, I'm not as picky.

i meant the intel nvme drives with built-in optane cache.

 

i do have an amd cpu but i heard storemi sucks