Where I live, DRAM-less SSDs are a lot cheaper (half the price). Most sources online say “go for an SSD with DRAM”. But I wonder, are cases in which a DRAM-less SSD will do just fine?
My main focus is resurrecting old laptops (from 2006 to 2015), installing GNU/Linux and an sometimes investing in an SSD will give them a performance boost, but the budget is limited because I can’t sella uch an old laptop at a non very budgety price.
In most cases, DRAM-less makes little difference for the average user. The biggest difference is for very large transfers, like copying large games between drives. Either way, it’s an easy 3-to-5 times performance upgrade compared to an HDD.
I don’t even understand how dram ssd would be significantly faster outside of benchmarks.
The OS caches everything to PC dram and sends it out to the SSD. So adding more ram to your PC would have the same effect.
In benchmarks, the dram ssd appears to be much faster by return control to the OS much sooner. But a non dram ssd is getting data from PC cache dram via dma and that’s not impacting CPU load. So it’s not really improving the speed.
It allows the drive to be used more quickly. If you’ve ever tried using a computer while the disk is at 100% usage, you’ll have noticed that anything you do that requires disk access slows to a crawl. With DRAM on the drive, it takes more to overload the drive and makes smaller transfers nearly instant, as data gets buffered into the much faster DRAM rather than directly to the SSD.
Like I mentioned though, in most cases the average user won’t notice a difference. If you really want to squeeze a bit of extra performance out of your drive, that’s where you’ll want the DRAM. If you’re just trying to get old laptops running well again, it’s basically a non-factor.
It allows the drive to be used more quickly
But not anymore so than adding the same amount of dram to the PC. It’s cpu->cpu dram->SSD dram->ssd. It will only show a performance difference on benchmarks or if your PC ram is completely full. You could get more performance by adding dram to the PC and telling the OS to never go below X amount of disk cache.
makes smaller transfers nearly instant, as data gets buffered into the much faster DRAM rather than directly to the SSD.
That’s not actual speed but benchmark speed. A copy is going to PC cache and then gets written out to the SSD. Having SSD dram allows the SSD to say “done” sooner to the OS despite it taking the same total time.
