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In what cases is a DRAM-less SSD good enough? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

If you're using a modern NVMe SSD you can simply ignore the presence or lack of a DRAM cache. Modern PCIe devices can use Host Memory Buffer to let the CPU map part of your RAM as the cache, and because with PCIe the CPU is the one accessing the SSD directly anyway, the cost in latency is minimal. The end result is that if you do an extremely heavy I/O benchmark you can indeed measure the difference, but if you're loading programs, saving files, playing games and whatever else, it really doesn't matter.

For SATA SSDs the difference is way more significant, but then again, if you're just restoring old laptops a DRAM-less SATA SSD will be so much faster at responding to each request compared to those little laptop HDDs that the upgrade will be more than worth it anyway, and spending extra for a DRAM cache might not be worth the machine you're dealing with. The end result will likely be that your file write speeds won't be super impressive, but your read speeds and latency will be great, so for most purposes it will behave like any SSD and give you the same benefits.