As far as exciting PC components go,
storage is pretty close to the bottom. So, I can understand why many gamers
simply add up their Steam backlog, key their target capacity into the filter
menu, sort by price, and click buy. I mean, it's not like your SSD impacts
gaming performance anyway. Or does it? Actually, it can. And even for
day-to-day use, the difference between a bottom-of-the-barrel SSD and a good one
can be a lot more than you would think from quickly glancing at a spec sheet.
And I'm not just talking about performance. Some of the most popular
SSDs on the market are missing an important feature that also impacts
reliability. I'm talking about cold,
hard cash, baby. That little DRAM cash
chip right there can [music] make a big difference, and many SSD makers just
don't want to talk about it. To the point where until you peel up the
sticker, it can be hard to know whether their product has one or doesn't. Why?
Of course, the answer is the other kind of cash. So, let's talk about how to
tell the difference, how much it matters or doesn't matter, and which
manufacturers are transparent about their products, and which ones seem to
be going out of their way to make this information harder to find. Just like
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>> [music]
>> What's the difference between this SSD and this one? Well, if you knew that
this one came later, and if you were already familiar with this one, you
would probably think that the SE was short for second edition or special
edition and that wow, that's a pretty good deal, right? Wrong. See, unlike the
original, the sequel omits a DRAM chip
making it about as good of a follow-up on the original as the return of Jafar.
But, if you look at the product pages or the technical specifications, you will
find no mention of that important [music] difference. Now, the SE does
have things about it that are better. It moves to PCIe Gen 4, but the thing is
that even in a best-case scenario, this
drive hardly takes advantage of that increased bandwidth. So, what is
supposed to be a product information sheet turns instead into a product
marketing sheet and WD [music] is far from the only one engaging in this
behavior. So, why does it matter? Well,
your SSD is actually a tiny little computer inside your computer with its
own little energy-efficient SOC called a controller. The SOC [music] contains a
CPU, firmware, its own memory by the way, and everything it needs both to
interface with your PC and with the NAND flash chips that actually store your
data. The ones that have a DRAM cache are using that to store the flash
translation layer, which is sort of like a map or a lookup table that tells your
operating system exactly where all of
the data is stored on the physical NAND that makes up your storage. Aside from
improving performance by just knowing where your data lives, especially as the
drive becomes more full, that map helps your SSD to organize and decide which
blocks are best to erase and where to write new data in order to minimize
wear. But, since some drives don't have a DRAM cache, obviously that's not the
only solution. Modern drives do have some good enough workarounds so they
don't need to use expensive DRAM, which is especially relevant today. For NVMe
drives, the ones that look like this, host memory buffer is a feature that
uses a little bit of your system memory to store this map. It's not as fast as
having it directly on board the SSD or as large, but given that this strategy
is usually employed in lower cost drives, the PCIe interface has enough
bandwidth for it to offer decent performance. Finally, the map can just
be stored on the good old regular NAND. None of these strategies are as good as
a dedicated DRAM chip on board though, which is exactly why years ago the
industry identified DRAM caches as an important factor for potential buyers
and plopped it front and center. But [music] then, fast forward to today and
do you know whether your WD Black SSD has a DRAM chip? I do. Let me explain.
The top end SN850X does, but the SN7100 and SN770 do not, which is weird because
if you go back a little further to the SN750, that drive does have a DRAM chip.
Not the SN750 SE though. [music] And things are even worse in WD Blue. Did
you know that if you buy a SATA WD Blue SA510 in 2 TB, it has a DRAM chip, but
the smaller sizes of the same model don't? Are you confused yet?
You should be. No, really. You should be. As far as we can tell, WD
Black, Blue, Green, etc. are just colors
that exist [music] more to trick you into thinking something is better than
it is than they are about clear and consistent product labeling for
consumers. And WD is not the only one guilty of this.
SanDisk, Seagate, MSI, Corsair, Crucial, and Netac have all been guilty at times
of not sharing whether their drives use DRAM or not. Now, to be fair to our
corporate overlords, please don't punish me. Being DRAM-less doesn't make an SSD
useless. Doesn't even make it bad. Modern drives with host memory buffer
can be perfectly performant, especially as a secondary storage drive or for for
And I will always say that real world performance trumps whatever you can put
on a spec sheet. But I also always say that consumers have a right to be
informed about what they're buying. And too often, we were not able to confirm
whether a device had a DRAM chip or didn't without resorting to a
third-party resource like TechPowerUp or just having the physical drive in our
hands so that we could peel off the heat spreader {slash} sticker, likely voiding
our warranty. And this is important because there is one situation where I
would strongly recommend a DRAM cache, and that's as an operating system drive.
This is especially true as your drive starts to get older and more full, but
you will notice a difference in system responsiveness during background
operations like system updates or virus scans. And furthermore, if you wanted to
play a game that benefits from DirectStorage, that is, streaming game
assets directly from your SSD, it might not be a terrible idea to have a DRAM
cache drive for that as well. I think the most frustrating thing about this
for me, though, is how easy it would be for manufacturers to fix it. Samsung,
for all of their participation in this problem of some drives being DRAM-less
and others not, at least actually says whether their drives have DRAM right on
the product pages. I shouldn't have to praise them for that, but here we are. So, what do we do?
Well, we vote with our wallets. WD is dead as an SSD brand now, but SanDisk
still exists as a separate entity and has had a similarly spotty history.
Though, to their credit, they've begun specifying the cache in their new Optimus lines data sheet, so [music]
that's progress. As for the companies who do disclose things properly, well,
Samsung we already mentioned, but also Kingston and Acer Predator all list
whether their drives have a DRAM chip. So, as new Gen 5 SSDs continue to come
onto the market, pick the ones that let consumers know what the heck is inside
them. And I mean, just generally, make your voice heard. If you were
researching an SSD and you had to dig deep to figure out whether it had D-RAM
or not, let the manufacturer know that that major shopping experience
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You guys enjoyed this video, maybe you'll enjoy the time we water-cooled an SSD. Totally unnecessary, but definitely
fun.