Are NVME SSDs without DRAM worse than hard drives?

[4EverBadAtPortal2]

Are they any better than HDD's? I'm planning to buy an NVMe SSD soon as an upgrade from my current one (256GB, DRAM-less).

[MBK]

They may not be as reliable as one with DRAM, but they still are NVME SSDs

[r.linder]

No, they still get a lot more performance than mechanical hard drives because they aren't limited to SATA bandwidth, there's only specific instances where a DRAMless SATA SSD can become slower than a HDD

[Bad 💀 Motha]

You say NVME as if that means a spec. It just means PCIE M2 instead of SATA M2.
Which exact NVME specs is it? They can range from like 2500MB/s all the way up to about 11000MB/s

[Illusion of Progress]

No, they're not worse than an HDD. A lot of people exaggerate this by confusing "the sustained write speeds can drop very low" (and indeed, sometimes lower than an HDD) as meaning they are slower, but that comes down to other factors rather than the presence (or lack of) DRAM.

When SSDs were new and SATA only, the lack of DRAM was indeed a bigger deal. With NVMe drives, it's far less of a deal. HMB is also used now which uses RAM as a cache, and no matter how fast any SSD is, this tends to be a lot faster. It's why I'll often do a file operation to my HDD and it goes at GB (yes, gigabytes) per second for a bit, despite it not actually writing that fast. An NVMe without DRAM will often be far better than a SATA with DRAM, for example. I'd personally still recommend an SSD with DRAM for an OS drive if you're something who uses your PC a lot and in more than typical ways, but lacking it is far from the death song people make it out to be. People tend to confuse "DRAM" and "cache" and they are not the same thing.

And for games drives, it really doesn't matter. DRAM impacts writes, not reads, and gaming is mostly read heavy. You might see a slower download/installation process with Steam but that's about it. Even a low end SATA, QLC, bottom-of-the-barrel, as-bad-as-it-gets type drive (like a Samsung QVO) is perfectly fine for most games, and probably even many day to day tasks as an OS drive for the average user. Power users would want more though.

Lastly, if you're using an SSD without DRAM now, you should already have a first hand experience how one can perform as an OS drive.

The big thing with drives with DRAM is that they tend to be on drives that are otherwise good (even sans the DRAM), so a lot of people conflate those good things because of the DRAM when it's not. DRAM mostly helps with heavy, heavy writing, and longevity of the drive (especially if your write to it a lot relative to its capacity). Most mid-range NVMe drives lack DRAM which tells you all you need to know; it's a luxury but it's not necessary 9 times out of 10 because there are very good drives despite lacking it.

Do be aware that 256 GB capacities are low today, meaning any drive with such capacity will either be an old model, or a newer one that's very budget oriented, so don't confuse any of this as saying the drive will match a faster SSD of today. It won't. There will certainly be cases where slow SSDs can get slow (sometimes very slow). But by no means is any NVMe drive slower than an HDD all around. HDDs are for storage; you really should not be using them as system/OS drives anymore outside of use-cases where system responsiveness isn't a big deal.

[Lord Flashheart]

NVMe is just a type of interface.
There ar great drives and saome really bad ones.


It all of course depends on what you are doing.

Typically NVME performance will be better that a hard drive.

The exception could be with large file copies.
With no DRAM and likley qnand (4 bits/cell), they rate can plummet.

[_I_]

any ssd is faster than a hdd
unless the ssd has been full or used a long time and its degraded performance

[Bad 💀 Motha]

But yes, especially when regarding NVME SSDs vs any mechanical HDD. No HDD comes close. Your cheapest bottom of the barrel NVME SSD would be far better at overall read/write speeds and IOPS. However the cheaper SSD models probably won't last as long either

[4EverBadAtPortal2]

Originally posted by Bad 💀 Motha:

You say NVME as if that means a spec. It just means PCIE M2 instead of SATA M2.
Which exact NVME specs is it? They can range from like 2500MB/s all the way up to about 11000MB/s

Gen 3 NVMe.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Yea Gen3 or later you're fine. Plenty fast.

Again dont look at the reads and writes look at the IOPS. How well a drive can multitask. No HDD has good IOPS as it gets saturated so quickly. DRAM-less SSDs I totally stay away from when it comes to an OS, Games or heavy work load type of drive. If you want to use one for downloads and storage, to me that's perfectly fine, as it least it can still serve a purpose. And if that's all you happen to have for now, again it's fine. I would look to upgrade to better SSDs as their prices have come down. WD Black or Samsung 990 EVO or PRO in a 2TB or 4TB aren't too bad price wise. If you want some more affordable options then look at models from TeamGroup, ADATA and Crucial. NVME Gen4 are now the bare minimum going forward. Gen3 all being phased out

[Illusion of Progress]

Originally posted by Bad 💀 Motha:

DRAM-less SSDs I totally stay away from when it comes to an OS, Games or heavy work load type of drive.

DRAM doesn't really matter for games because DRAM helps with writes, not with reads.

You may see a difference with Steam's download/installations process, but not while actually playing the games.

[smokerob79]

Originally posted by Bad 💀 Motha:

You say NVME as if that means a spec. It just means PCIE M2 instead of SATA M2.
Which exact NVME specs is it? They can range from like 2500MB/s all the way up to about 11000MB/s

wrong....NVME is the controller and you can get SATA versions of it in industrial drives......ever seen SATA EXPRESS sockets....yeah those are NVME

[r.linder]

Originally posted by smokerob79:

Originally posted by Bad 💀 Motha:

You say NVME as if that means a spec. It just means PCIE M2 instead of SATA M2.
Which exact NVME specs is it? They can range from like 2500MB/s all the way up to about 11000MB/s

wrong....NVME is the controller and you can get SATA versions of it in industrial drives......ever seen SATA EXPRESS sockets....yeah those are NVME

It's an interface specification... the controller is just manufactured to use that interface

[p0k314NET]

Everything is better then ancient HDD tech.

[Çapgun]

Originally posted by 4EverBadAtPortal2:

Are they any better than HDD's? I'm planning to buy an NVMe SSD soon as an upgrade from my current one (256GB, DRAM-less).

Dram less nvme suitable for normal daily work such as opening word document or exploring internet. Dram nvme especially for high performance operations for games or recording video capturing motion capture data. So take this in your mind. Good shopping

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Originally posted by Illusion of Progress:

Originally posted by Bad 💀 Motha:

DRAM-less SSDs I totally stay away from when it comes to an OS, Games or heavy work load type of drive.

DRAM doesn't really matter for games because DRAM helps with writes, not with reads.

You may see a difference with Steam's download/installations process, but not while actually playing the games.

Well they should be fine for Games drive. Just not great as an OS drive or drive for heavy work apps such as 3d Rendering or Video Recording