Which SSD should I buy

This is a question that I get all the time from people who think I know my way around computers. So i will try making it as simple as possible because people who ask me are usually not the savviest of people when it comes to technology.

A table comparing DRAM-less SSDs to SSDs with DRAM is available here (Nothing extra ordinary, just to give you a feel of what variables are compared)

Storage space

There is honestly very little that I can say about storage that you don’t already know, your workload, and what you store on your computer is something you probably know all about, if you have plenty of video content, you need a big disk, if you just need to browse the web, a very small 128GB disk would do, one more thing to keep note of is durability, in the world of SSDs, the TB-Written endurance/longevity rating increases as the disk grows bigger, simply because flash cells have a limited number of write cycles, the larger the disk, the more flash cells, the more data you can write to a disk without it going bad, Also, some performance parameters change slightly between different sizes of the same model, but I will not be making a choice based on those numbers, So the space consideration will boil down to “What are you planning to store on the disk”, and how much space will that need

Speed

The last time we spotted people to whom speed meant freedom of the soul was in 1997, ever since then speed has come to imply “Time savings” more than anything, So this is the area where things will get a bit complicated, the list of keywords you see here are what will be covered in this post

  • Max transfer rate
  • IOPS
  • Max sustained rate
  • Burst rate
  • DRAM
  • SLC Cache
  • 4K reads/writes
  • HMB (Host Memory Buffer)
  • NAND flash memory for caching

Whether we are talking about spinning disks or SSDs, there is the maximum speed, which is basically a sequential read or write to the disk, which now, with NVMe (PCIe connected SSDs) has reached crazy speeds, and there is IOPS (Input/Output operations)

Cheap SSDs don’t come with DRAM, and for the average user, there is no problem with that, most data is for reading, and the SSD is hardly ever pressed to a workload where the difference is noticeable, so do I need a disk with DRAM ?

If you are just someone who plays games, runs a web browser, and boots windows, the short answer is NO, the difference in time is not worth it.

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