Cheapest nvme drive with a dram cache?

[eqalidan]

I kind of want to get a 4tb drive to use for games, I also have need/use of very fast file transferring given I have a 200gb database that gets manual backups (this way I don't have a borked database backup and then the backup is also screwed)

my only problem is its kind of hard to find cheap drives and find out if they have any dram or not on them, I dont really need the most reliable drive from the most trusted brands, that would be nice dotn get me wrong, but im looking for as cheap as I can get as dense as I can get.

[🦊Λℚ𝓤ΛƑΛᗯҜᔕ🦊]

Diposting pertama kali oleh A&A ✠:

40-60 tabs?!
Now that explains everything. A $400 laptop means at least it has 8GB of RAM and I wouldn't be surprised if they load into the RAM and then write to the SSD again as swap.

Chrome is no where near that bad. I use it on my 5800X system and I have 54 tabs open right now. The entire chrome process is only using 6.5 GB of system ram with all tabs open. I understand it's meme-worthy but it's not as awful as people lead it to believe. There is a lot of disk access though when I first open chrome from a closed state.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Diposting pertama kali oleh 🦊Λℚ𝓤ΛƑΛᗯҜᔕ🦊:

Diposting pertama kali oleh A&A ✠:

40-60 tabs?!
Now that explains everything. A $400 laptop means at least it has 8GB of RAM and I wouldn't be surprised if they load into the RAM and then write to the SSD again as swap.

Chrome is no where near that bad. I use it on my 5800X system and I have 54 tabs open right now. The entire chrome process is only using 6.5 GB of system ram with all tabs open. I understand it's meme-worthy but it's not as awful as people lead it to believe. There is a lot of disk access though when I first open chrome from a closed state.

Yes you could save on RAM usage and Disk Activity by enabling the Tab Sleep function in Google Chrome. However this feature is not for everyone.

If you are more prone to using websites where refreshing the entire site can cause problems; then avoid using that sleeping tab feature.

[🦊Λℚ𝓤ΛƑΛᗯҜᔕ🦊]

Diposting pertama kali oleh Bad 💀 Motha:

Yes you could save on RAM usage and Disk Activity by enabling the Tab Sleep function in Google Chrome. However this feature is not for everyone.

If you are more prone to using websites where refreshing the entire site can cause problems; then avoid using that sleeping tab feature.

Or you know.. just use the right amount of ram like a normal person. 16GB is standard minimum in computers today, 32GB is slow to be adopted but is becoming more common in the near future.

[eqalidan]

Diposting pertama kali oleh Ralf:

Diposting pertama kali oleh 🦊Λℚ𝓤ΛƑΛᗯҜᔕ🦊:

The only thing DRAM-less NVME drives are good for is storage or infrequently used apps or games. Never for a system drive. That would be a big mistake.

Hey man, I got told that some of the fastest Gen4 drives are DRAM-less and NVMe drives are already so fast that it makes DRAM useless.

they are fast because they use portions of the disc in slc mode till it needs more storage, at that point is as fast as you can get, once it switches over, you notice the difference, mostly in writes, as as it will have weekly 200~ gb writes I would hit the point where it ♥♥♥♥♥ the bed kind of fast.

Diposting pertama kali oleh lsdninja:

Diposting pertama kali oleh Illusion of Progress:

Is there a particular reason you're focused on DRAM?

My guess is because Linus Tech Tips and other YouTube channels keep banging on about it.

I put WD Green SATA SSDs in a couple of systems and didn't notice any difference compared with machines that had higher end drives in them. The only time I saw less than stellar results from an SSD was in an old AMD APU system, but that's because everything about that platform, from the Bulldozer-based APUs down, was utter trash.

because I have used hdds in the past that have flipped over to pio (I think that's what it was) mode, if you don't know, its when an error in signalling happens, so instead of the hdd working at a few milliseconds for a seak and being able to read generally 100~mb a second, it decides to go into 1 second seeks and sub mb speeds, mine doing sub 100kb... it was a faulty cable and not drive, but it was a nightmare as that was the os drive, and depending on what I do, I can hit drives hard enough that it completely locks out older ssds from functioning till the task is done dramless would essentially function like a hdd in pio mode... probably a bit faster, but I have seen them ♥♥♥♥ the bed down to sub 50mb writes and seek times spiking higher than a fragmented hdd, I have no idea about hybrid memory for ssds, but gut tells me relying on that on a windows based system is probably not a smart idea given I just had windows decide thumbnails for files just aren't a thing... fun glitch that fixed itself with a restart, but annoying till restarted.

the drive would mostly be used for storing games, given we are probably going to move toward faster game loading, and I don't want to bog my c drive with games, a large dense, good enough secondary nvme would be nice (my current 4x gen 3 slot has a dead nvme in it, thanks samsung for having ♥♥♥♥ cross over to read only mode, and my current os drive is in the 2x gen 3 slot, I never moved it over because I half don't trust the main slot anymore, so that's where the game drive will go)

Diposting pertama kali oleh 🦊Λℚ𝓤ΛƑΛᗯҜᔕ🦊:

Diposting pertama kali oleh Bad 💀 Motha:

Honestly, even though a Crucial P3 Plus doesn't have DRAM its performance is still extremely good bang for buck.

The whole point though is this: Once someone experiences a DRAM'less NVME drive and then tries one with DRAM on it they will never want to use a normal DRAM'less NVME drive ever again.

The same goes for SATA SSD's: Once someone experiences a system running on a NVME Drive with DRAM as the system drive they will never want to go back to SATA SSD's again for any reason. The general performance of the system is that much better.

sata would honestly be fine for me if you could easily get ones that saturated sata... the problem is so many just don't in practice, and with games likely moving to actually using nvme speed for loading, it would be nice to have.

Diposting pertama kali oleh Bad 💀 Motha:

I kinda disagree unless you really are that dam picky. NVME drives generally don't help in running games any better for the most part. They are way over hyped. Now if you doing professional work like constantly video editing and such yes they can make a huge difference in that regard. Or large amounts of files copying from one drive to another sure. Otherwise not so much.

But yea if it was a cheaper SATA SSD without DRAM that can hurt performance quite a bit

any game pre direct storage yes, they seemed to cap out at around 300~ mb read would get you 90% of the load speed, but games with direct storage are capable of loading significantly faster, and with unreal 5's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ tech I just foresee streaming in assets being stupidly demanding going forward, epic themselves have shown off the game streaming being something around 300mb on load in and about a 10-50mb consistently load, but at the same time epic shows off unreal 4 being not a stuttering mess of an engine with their own games and no other company can manage to make unreal 4 perform anywhere near decent, so I don't trust dev compatance.

Diposting pertama kali oleh 🦊Λℚ𝓤ΛƑΛᗯҜᔕ🦊:

Diposting pertama kali oleh Bad 💀 Motha:

I output over 1000 PC builds per year now since the early 2000s

If that is true what you wrote then you should already know that the cost of NVME drives is very cheap now. We could get a Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB NVME drive with DRAM cache for $30 brand new today. Yes it's a PCI-Express 3.0 drive but despite that it will still out-perform all SATA SSD's (even the new ones, even 3D V-Cache ones) by a significant margin.

The prices have come down to a point now where there is no excuse or reason to not use a NVME SSD with DRAM on it for the main system drive in every new computer being built today and going forwards.

only real reason for a sata ssd over a nvme is just if you don't have extra nvme ports or your motherboard just doesn't have the pcie lanes to deal with it. my current motherboard has 2, and the only thing that really would require nvme would be video editing, program launching, games, and hot backup of mass database, well... realisticly if I had a newer motherboard that supported 128gb of ram or 256, I would just get ramdisc software and do the editing off there as most of what I would edit are temp files and the stuff on the ram disk would effectively be a proxy anyway and given that 14 hours of good enough (at least for me) takes up 17gb of space...

Diposting pertama kali oleh A&A ✠:

Diposting pertama kali oleh 🦊Λℚ𝓤ΛƑΛᗯҜᔕ🦊:

I have NVME drives with DRAM on them and a cheap 256GB NVME drive in a $400 laptop that my mother bought a few years ago that doesn't have DRAM in it. In the drive without DRAM it frequently gets overloaded (showing 100% active time in task manager in windows 10) in her laptop just from trivial things like:
opening chrome = overloaded for 30 seconds.

I don't understand how opening Google Chrome with a NVME DRAM-less SSD will cause overload for 30s.

I have a Kingston SA400S37240G, generally the cheapest 250GB drive from the local store, connected via SATA II (Yes, you heard me right) and I have no such problems.

I have had crome eat 120gb of a page file and 56gb of ram... I can't describe how much i hate how chrome disfunctions.

Diposting pertama kali oleh 🦊Λℚ𝓤ΛƑΛᗯҜᔕ🦊:

Diposting pertama kali oleh A&A ✠:

40-60 tabs?!
Now that explains everything. A $400 laptop means at least it has 8GB of RAM and I wouldn't be surprised if they load into the RAM and then write to the SSD again as swap.

Chrome is no where near that bad. I use it on my 5800X system and I have 54 tabs open right now. The entire chrome process is only using 6.5 GB of system ram with all tabs open. I understand it's meme-worthy but it's not as awful as people lead it to believe. There is a lot of disk access though when I first open chrome from a closed state.

yea... no, I have currently 1520 tabs open, yea its alot, it should be far FAR less but I haven't culled it back, it is technically only taking up 16 gb which is a complete lie. windows 10+ also does some stupid ♥♥♥♥ with ram that obfuscates how much programs are actually useing.

[A&A]

Ok, so you need an M.2 drive to back up your database and stuff, but your motherboard lacks M.2 slots.

I checked on PCPartpicker the Samsung Evo 990 is $350 but what if you get PCIe x 8 or 4 M.2 expansion cards and get 2 SSDs with 2TB and 1 or 2GB cache. This way you will be able to save 100-150$.

[Illusion of Progress]

Diposting pertama kali oleh eqalidan:

they are fast because they use portions of the disc in slc mode till it needs more storage, at that point is as fast as you can get, once it switches over, you notice the difference, mostly in writes, as as it will have weekly 200~ gb writes I would hit the point where it ♥♥♥♥♥ the bed kind of fast.

You're mixing up two things which I already pointed out people like to mix up.

You're mixing up DRAM and SRAM cache. People think DRAM is the SRAM cache, and it is not. All (or almost?) modern controllers have SRAM cache, even on DRAM-less drives.

They are two different things.

The DRAM holds the mapping tables and is used in wear leveling (hence the effect on endurance, but even this is typically overstated).

Yes, it can effect heavy write performance, but that's mostly it. Read performance isn't impacted by DRAM or the lack of it.

Diposting pertama kali oleh eqalidan:

dramless would essentially function like a hdd in pio mode... probably a bit faster

You're not going to have a PIO HDD experience by using an SSD without DRAM (this is coming from someone who also went through having an HDD set itself to PIO mode in the days or yore). I've also used SSDs without DRAM.

That's a very tall claim. And as they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

[🦊Λℚ𝓤ΛƑΛᗯҜᔕ🦊]

Diposting pertama kali oleh Illusion of Progress:

That's a very tall claim. And as they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Actually you are wrong there: No claims written on the steam forums ever "requires evidence". No one has to prove anything to anyone and you can't make them prove anything to you either.

[Illusion of Progress]

(I can't believe I have to point the following distinction out... Seriously...)

You think I'm saying people have to be forced to provide something, and I'm not.

What I'm actually saying is don't expect people to believe a random extraordinary claim without providing any evidence. Especially when evidence that does exists suggests the opposite of the claim.

[Ralf]

Diposting pertama kali oleh A&A ✠:

I checked on PCPartpicker the Samsung Evo 990 is $350 but what if you get PCIe x 8 or 4 M.2 expansion cards and get 2 SSDs with 2TB and 1 or 2GB cache. This way you will be able to save 100-150$.

980 Evo and 990 Evo drives are fakes made by delaihe, please do no buy them.

[A&A]

Diposting pertama kali oleh Ralf:

Diposting pertama kali oleh A&A ✠:

I checked on PCPartpicker the Samsung Evo 990 is $350 but what if you get PCIe x 8 or 4 M.2 expansion cards and get 2 SSDs with 2TB and 1 or 2GB cache. This way you will be able to save 100-150$.

980 Evo and 990 Evo drives are fakes made by delaihe, please do no buy them.

If they are from AliExpress, Wish or Ebay for cheap and are not recognized by Samsung Magician, they are obviously fake. In some cases, this even happens on Amazon.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Yes for the most part DRAM cache is needed if you plan to use the drive for very long sustained writes, not reads. However what is also true is most dram-less ssds are made cheaper for a reason, they aren't designed to have as much TBW and thus lower warranty length and overall a lesser long term reliability

[Illusion of Progress]

Indeed, it's about more than lacking DRAM. It's that the very cheapest of the cheapest will tend to have lesser everything. They will use lesser controllers, have a lower amount of NAND layers, may probably be QLC as opposed to TLC, are more likely to be bought in lower capacities (meaning less speed and less durability), and it all compounds on one another.

But in this case, the third cheapest (at the time anyway) 4 TB NVMe I found happened to be one that was a decent mid-range one with a good controller, good endurance, good warranty (5 years instead of 2 or 3), and had DRAM as well. So it seems OP can have their cake and eat it too anyway.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

It almost makes sense...
QLC = Quaility Lacking Care
TLC = Tender Loving Care

Tech-geek insider joke, but hey, if the shoe fits.