What Are DRAM-less SSDs?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2018-05-06
·
859 words · ~4 min read
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thanks for watching Techquickie click the subscribe button then enable
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notifications with the Bell icon so you won't miss any future videos sometimes
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it makes sense to skimp a little bit on a purchase to save a few bucks
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whopper without cheese a keyboard without RGB or a hotel room without the
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love tub and there's a breed of SSDs
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that's been hitting the market that uses a similar philosophy I'm talking about
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SSDs without DRAM that are sold at a
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lower price point than most other models well I mean hold on a second Linus SSDs
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without onboard memory that sounds fine
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why would an SSD need its own ran well
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here's the thing whenever your operating system wants to fetch something from
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your SSD like a game you want to play or a business plan that you need to work on
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it needs to know where that data is
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physically located on the drive in order
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to know this your SSD keep saying map of sorts that actively tracks where
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everything is I mean most people don't know this but your SSD has to move your
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data around quite a bit so that you don't end up with a situation where some
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of its flash memory cells wear out faster than the others it's a protective
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strategy called wear leveling on most SSDs this data map is kept on a DRAM
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chip because D ran is much faster than
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the NAND flash that your SSD uses for data storage in fact you can experience
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this for yourself if you ever use your main system DRAM as a RAM disk something
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you can learn more about here keeping the map on DRAM also results in better
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performance because it's faster speed means that the OS won't have to wait as
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long for the SSD to locate the desired data however it is obviously possible to
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eliminate DRAM entirely and keep this mapping data either on the main flash
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memory itself or just copy it over to
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your system memory after you turn your computer on and as we alluded to earlier
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an SSD without DRAM tends to be cheaper
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than the one that has it but she does
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not necessarily equate to good value
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though if all you're looking for is better than a hard drive performance for
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the least possible amount of money could that gas station sushi SST be good
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enough well as it turns out moving the
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data map off the DRAM cache creates some issues that are hard to ignore because
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it takes so long for the SSD to locate data performance on DRAM las' SSDs is
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usually noticeably slower than it is on
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mainstream SSDs especially for random
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reads and writes the small data operations that access different parts
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of the drive that incidentally make up the bulk of the average users experience
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if they have their OS installed on the SSD and with drives that use the NAND
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flash to store the data map this has the added drawback of putting more wear on
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the drive than it would otherwise have so it'll be slower and then adding
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insult to injury it may actually die sooner you might have noticed that the
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warranty for a dear analyst SSD is often shorter than for other drives
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so if you're trying to save money on your next essay purchase use caution if
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you start looking at DRAM less SSDs find
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as many reviews as you can about the particular model you're looking at and
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you know what now forget it I'm actually not going to recommend any of them it's
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better to find an inexpensive SSD with a
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dram cache in most cases you don't end
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up saving that much money anyway and so the moral of the story here is sometimes
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trying to cheap out just isn't worth it though with that said I've heard that
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stocking up on store brand aluminium foil is a pretty good idea
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