DRAM-less SSD's: Are they fine for HTPC data drives?

[DJRWolf]

I have a Home Theater PC tucked behind my TV with a 2 TB HDD for data and I am planning on replacing that with an SSD down the road and I am wondering that since all I do is playback media from it and some times add to the collection if it matters if the SSD has DRAM or not.

[Kilrah]

Will be just fine.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Any ssd will have more than enough performance for media playback. Dram won't matter

[Fasauceome]

A dram-less SSD is usually a concern for longevity, since it will use some of the storage cells to compensate for lack of dram. But, I'd you aren't reading and writing a lot over a long period of time, it doesn't have nearly as much of an impact 

[Alex Atkin UK]

DRAM is mainly to keep writes fast as you get OS stalls if the drive cannot keep up with the speed you are trying to write at.  If you are mostly reading it will make no difference as your OS will use system RAM as a read cache anyway.

Also on the larger drives as you have more channels and more SLC cache, it tends to be less of an issue.

The longevity thing is only if you are regularly deleting and writing a lot of data to the drive, then the constant juggle between the SLC cache and the rest of the NAND will wear it out faster.  But even with DRAM that will be an issue unless you use a higher end SSD that uses NAND will less levels, but it all comes down to how much you are writing on a regular basis.

[Latvian Video]

It will be fine, my main pc has a DRAM-less ssd (Crucial BX500 256gb), been using it for like 2 years, hwinfo shows 85% health. You should be fine even if you are actively writing and reading data

[mariushm]

52 minutes ago, Fasauceome said:

A dram-less SSD is usually a concern for longevity, since it will use some of the storage cells to compensate for lack of dram. But, I'd you aren't reading and writing a lot over a long period of time, it doesn't have nearly as much of an impact 

Only writing affects longevity and to a very low amount.

DRAM is never used to cache writes, so having DRAM doesn't increase longevity by a significant enough amount.

DRAM helps with IOPS, concurrent operations (multiple reads and writes simultaneously) and that's about all ... and modern drivers can take advantage of HMB feature to "borrow" some amount of ram from the computer and use that memory amount to improve IOPS.