Samsung 980 non-PRO 500GB (DRAM less) vs Samsung 870 Evo 500GB (with DRAM cache)

[medium_tuna]

I can get one of the two for the same price? Which one should i get?
My current setup has a 1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm drive. No SSD. 
I want the SSD to be very reliable and long-lasting at the same time being substantially faster when booting up, opening apps and games.

So Which one? Thanks

[Eigenvektor]

Shouldn't make too much of a difference in practical terms. Both are going to be significantly faster than an HDD.

 

The 970 Evo is technically a tiny bit faster

https://idealssd.com/samsung-970-evo-plus-vs-980-which-is-best

[medium_tuna]

5 hours ago, Eigenvektor said:

Shouldn't make too much of a difference in practical terms. Both are going to be significantly faster than an HDD.

 

The 970 Evo is technically a tiny bit faster

https://idealssd.com/samsung-970-evo-plus-vs-980-which-is-best

From a reliability standpoint which one is better? I heard dram less ssds wears out faster. Also note that one ssd in discussion is 870 evo, a sata drive. Not 970 evo which is a m.2.

Basically dramless m. 2 vs. Sata ssd with dram

[LIGISTX]

49 minutes ago, ramesh_madara said:

From a reliability standpoint which one is better? I heard dram less ssds wears out faster. Also note that one ssd in discussion is 870 evo, a sata drive. Not 970 evo which is a m.2.

Basically dramless m. 2 vs. Sata ssd with dram

Nvme is way, way faster. SATA maxes out at 500 mbps, the 980 does 3.5gbps. That said, almost no home user workloads benefit from that addition speed. But, that said, nvme > SATA in just about every way and situation. 
 

Dramless does wear a little faster, but Samsung stuff always lasts a long time and except for a few firmware hiccups they have had, Samsung SSD’s have been phenomenal since they started baking them a decade ago. So I wouldn’t worry at all. I run my homelab with a 980.

[Eigenvektor]

4 hours ago, ramesh_madara said:

From a reliability standpoint which one is better?

You'd have to find long-term statistics for Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) to get an accurate picture. But you're unlikely to run into issues with either.

 

4 hours ago, ramesh_madara said:

Also note that one ssd in discussion is 870 evo, a sata drive. Not 970 evo which is a m.2.

Ah, my bad, I read 970 Evo. I've used both SATA and NVMe drives as boot drives. The NVMe is definitely faster in benchmarks, but unless you measure boot times with a stopwatch, you'll be hard pressed to notice the difference. It's something like 10 vs 12 seconds on my machine.

 

I'd go with the NVMe in this case, because it is technically faster, which can make a difference in game load times. But even there I haven't really noticed a huge difference even though my 970 Evo has 3.5 GB/s, while my older 860 Evo only has somewhere around 500 MB/s. Most software isn't limited by I/O performance beyond a certain point (e.g. CPU speed for decompression becomes the limiting factor once you pass hundreds of MB/s).

 

In any case, the 970 Evo is a nice alternative to the 980