Question Importance of SSDs with DRAM in 2025?

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NeoGunHero

NeoGunHero

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Mar 17, 2015
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Hello,

I'm looking for a cheap, affordable 1TB NVME drive. I currently have a WD Blue SN550 1TB, which although is not the fastest drive ever, is speedy enough for me.

However, my main issue with this drive, is that whenever I try to download something that is maybe ~30GB or more, my download speed is CRIPPLED to a eye-watering 1MB/s max.
I have read countless posts across the web stating this is due to being a DRAM-less drive, whenever downloading something large it fills up the cache, causing it to have very low write speeds.

So, in my hunt for a new SSD, I have placed a huge importance on getting a drive with DRAM inside. However, most 1TB DRAM drives seem to be closer to $100, while DRAM-less ones are a bit closer to $50. I am wanting good bang for buck, and want to be able to download as much as I want without ever having my speeds crippled.

So my question is, how important is it to have a drive that has DRAM inside? My drive is years old, so the tech has assuredly gotten better over the years, but I don't want to run into this issue ever again since it is so incredibly annoying.

Are there any good DRAM-less drives that could handle a 100GB download without any issue? For context, my internet maxes at 45MB/s, and again on my current drive it cripples to 1MB/s if the download file is too large.

Please correct me if I got anything wrong, and I will post my specs below if that helps. Thanks!

GPU: Zotac RTX 2060 6GB AMP
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5700X @ 3.4GHz
Mobo: Gigabyte AORUS Gaming 5 X470
RAM: TeamGroup DDR4 32GB @ 3600MHz
Storage: WD Blue 1TB NVME M2 SSD, Crucial MX500 1TB SATA M2 SSD, Samsung 870 EVO 500GB SATA SSD
PSU: EVGA 80+ Bronze 600W
Mouse: Razer DeathAdder v2
Keyboard: Corsair K95 RGB Platinum w/Cherry MX Brown
Audio: HyperX Cloud Alpha
 
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NeoGunHero said:
If it is not necessarily a requirement to combat this issue, then I would still be happy with a DRAM-less drive. It was just reading too many internet posts that made me think DRAM was the be-all end-all to my issues. Of course DRAM drives are better, but not all DRAM-less drives would act like mine, is what I'm getting from all the replies here.
Click to expand...
Just FYI, some of the WD Blue drives do have a bug of sorts where you actually want to disable write caching. It was discussed a bit on my discord server but I did not test it myself (I have an SN580, but it's a portable game drive for a Steam Deck). Looking at your reply above, it seems like you came across this information. I can verify that we've had users that needed to do...
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Mobo: Gigabyte AORUS Gaming 5 X470
What BIOS version are you on for your motherboard?

Storage: WD Blue 1TB NVME M2 SSD, Crucial MX500 1TB SATA M2 SSD, Samsung 870 EVO 500GB SATA SSD
Out of curiosity, which SSD is assigned what role in your build? Are they all on the latest firmware?
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Is Windows Write Caching disabled?
 
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Your download speeds will be limited to the slowest part of the download chain.
Since all is ok until the size exceeds 30gb, yes, look at the drive.
First of all, it is a sata drive, even though it is connected as a m.2 device.
That limits the speed to 560/510 MB/s or so.
Were it a pcie variant, the speeds would be more like the 7,250/6,300MB/s om a Samsung 990 EVO plus $75:
https://www.newegg.com/samsung-1tb-990-evo-plus-nvme-2-0/p/N82E16820147899?Item=N82E16820147899

How full is your ssd? If it is near full, the device, itself will take more time to find blocks of space to store the download.

Whatever size cache your device might have, it will eventually get overrun by a large download and the writes must proceed at the limits of the device itself.
 
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Hello everyone, I am at my PC now, here are my specific drives: WD Blue SN570 1TB NVME M2, Crucial MX500 SATA M2, Samsung 860 EVO SATA.
Lutfij said:
Mobo: Gigabyte AORUS Gaming 5 X470
What BIOS version are you on for your motherboard?

Storage: WD Blue 1TB NVME M2 SSD, Crucial MX500 1TB SATA M2 SSD, Samsung 870 EVO 500GB SATA SSD
Out of curiosity, which SSD is assigned what role in your build? Are they all on the latest firmware?
+
Is Windows Write Caching disabled?
Click to expand...
Mobo: Gigabyte AORUS Gaming 5 X470
BIOS Version F65G, the latest version IIRC. However, this issue has persisted for a while. I only update BIOS maybe 1-2 times per year whenever I do a deep system clean.

The WD Blue drive is my main boot drive, slotted into the main PCIe 3.0 x4 slot. It has Windows 10, programs, and a few games. 441GB free of 930GB.
The Crucial MX500 SATA M2 is my main game drive, since it downloads faster. I have gotten this drive very close to full before without noticeable performance loss. 235GB free of 927GB.
The Samsung EVO SATA drive is just additional storage, I don't use it much. I've had it for a while, just an older drive I keep connected. 408GB free of 465GB.
geofelt said:
Your download speeds will be limited to the slowest part of the download chain.
Since all is ok until the size exceeds 30gb, yes, look at the drive.
First of all, it is a sata drive, even though it is connected as a m.2 device.
Click to expand...
The WD Blue drive I'm talking about is a Gen 2/3 NVME M2 drive, max advertised speed is 2500MB/s I believe. This only happens on that particular drive. The Crucial MX500 drive I'm using is absolutely a SATA M2 drive, but this drive nor the actual SATA Samsung drive I use have this issue, it is only the NVME M2 WD Blue drive.
USAFRet said:
Downloading from where?

Drive type has basically zero effect on d/l speed. This goes all the way back to HDDs.
Click to expand...
I only download files this large on Steam and other game launchers such as Xbox App and Epic Game Store. The Xbox App has always been noticeably slower than the other drives in terms of download speeds, so it's not just the services I'm using. I have played around with some of the download settings in these apps, but again as I mentioned above it only happens on the WD Blue NVME M2 drive. The SATA M2 and SATA cable drives can hit the max 45MB/s download speed no matter the size of the files.
 
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IhPUGLl.png
z3FyHuP.png

Here are some screenshots of me trying to download one of the largest games I own, RDR2 at 112GB. You can see in the first picture, initially it downloads at the max speed before losing drive speed and download speed dropping with it. It picked up a bit to 11MB/s, then in the second picture you can see it dropped to 1MB/s to 0, then back up again to 27, before doing this all over again.

I want a drive that is fast, fairly cheap, and doesn't give me this issue, hopefully ever.
 
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NeoGunHero said:
IhPUGLl.png
z3FyHuP.png

Here are some screenshots of me trying to download one of the largest games I own, RDR2 at 112GB. You can see in the first picture, initially it downloads at the max speed before losing drive speed and download speed dropping with it. It picked up a bit to 11MB/s, then in the second picture you can see it dropped to 1MB/s to 0, then back up again to 27, before doing this all over again.

I want a drive that is fast, fairly cheap, and doesn't give me this issue, hopefully ever.
Click to expand...
Is write caching enabled on this disk?
Is the optimize app enabled for this disk?
 
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That is DEFINITELY not normal but you'd have to diagnose the system and/or drive. The SN570 isn't a bad drive. A drive being DRAM-less does not de facto make it a bad drive, either, even for sequential transfers. Especially since any drive can keep up with Internet speeds, although lots of small files/updates limit potential bandwidth on the drive. I suspect something else is going on here (hence requiring diagnosis) but you can replace the drive easily enough. If you absolutely want DRAM, which shouldn't be a requirement, that's the Samsung 990 PRO, the WD Black SN850X, or the Crucial T500, although the last one is not quite as consistent.
 
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Maxxify said:
That is DEFINITELY not normal but you'd have to diagnose the system and/or drive. The SN570 isn't a bad drive. A drive being DRAM-less does not de facto make it a bad drive, either, even for sequential transfers. Especially since any drive can keep up with Internet speeds, although lots of small files/updates limit potential bandwidth on the drive. I suspect something else is going on here (hence requiring diagnosis) but you can replace the drive easily enough. If you absolutely want DRAM, which shouldn't be a requirement, that's the Samsung 990 PRO, the WD Black SN850X, or the Crucial T500, although the last one is not quite as consistent.
Click to expand...
If it is not necessarily a requirement to combat this issue, then I would still be happy with a DRAM-less drive. It was just reading too many internet posts that made me think DRAM was the be-all end-all to my issues. Of course DRAM drives are better, but not all DRAM-less drives would act like mine, is what I'm getting from all the replies here.
 
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NeoGunHero said:
If it is not necessarily a requirement to combat this issue, then I would still be happy with a DRAM-less drive. It was just reading too many internet posts that made me think DRAM was the be-all end-all to my issues. Of course DRAM drives are better, but not all DRAM-less drives would act like mine, is what I'm getting from all the replies here.
Click to expand...
Even drives with DRAM cache will slow down once cache is overloaded and single files are larger than cache. DRAM cache is important for small files like those with OS and that's only time it helps.
 
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I'm going to do some testing, but I need some help with the method. After more research on this particular WD Blue SN570 drive, a lot of people have the same issue. However, they say to disable Write Caching when downloading, then turn it back on when gaming.

If I do this and the download speed works, how can I test performance of the drive while gaming? Is there a real-time monitoring program I could use?
 
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According to this review of the WD Blue on Tom's, the SN550 has a small SLC cache which rapidly fills up:

".... the SN550's SLC write cache is very small compared to its competitors. After writing at full speed for four seconds, write speed degraded from 1,850 MBps down to an average of just 466 MBps."

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/wd-blue-sn550-m2-nvme-ssd-review-best-dramless-ssd-yet

pV7UeugysXkLTd3dycB78Z-1200-80.png.webp


Despite the SN550's SLC cache being small, assuming the native transfer rate of the underlying 96L BiCS4 TLC NAND flash is 446 Megabytes per second (and not 446 Megabits per second), I would have expected it to cope with the internet download speed of 45MB/s, which is one tenth the supposed TLC transfer speed.

However, I have noticed irregular "bursty" transfer speeds to SSD and HDD when copying individual movie files of 10 to 50GB. There must be some other factor at play here that I don't understand.

I've had similar problems coping hundreds of Gigabytes of files over my 10Gigabit OM3 fibre optic home LAN. On some machines, the download stops completely for 10 seconds, before resuming at full speed for another minute.

Simple question. Is your Steam game download one huge file, or hundreds of small files which might slow things down?
 
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Misgar said:
Simple question. Is your Steam game download one huge file, or hundreds of small files which might slow things down?
Click to expand...
Not sure if this is the answer to your question, but typically it happens when downloading one large game from my Steam library. Anything that is ~30GB (made up number, not sure the actual threshold, but this issue only happens when downloading large files at once) total or higher causing the download speed issue. I don't know if Steam downloads the entire game as one large file or breaks it down into multiple packages.

If I'm downloading lots of smaller files, that is no issue. My OS and browser are set to this drive, and I have experienced downloading multiple files off the internet with no issue. Things like downloading mods off Nexus Mods or downloading samples/sound packs/plugins for my DAW, both scenarios consisted of downloading lots of files typically under 2GB each without issue. Of course, multiple simultaneous downloads will cripple speed but having them download in sequential order did not pose this issue. It is only single larger files.

I also want to note this issue is not tied to Steam only. The only time I download files this large is for games, and I use multiple launchers, i.e. Steam, Epic Games, Xbox App, Ubisoft, EA, Battlenet, all of those. Any time I download a large game, regardless of platform, download speed and write speeds suffer.
 
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NeoGunHero said:
If it is not necessarily a requirement to combat this issue, then I would still be happy with a DRAM-less drive. It was just reading too many internet posts that made me think DRAM was the be-all end-all to my issues. Of course DRAM drives are better, but not all DRAM-less drives would act like mine, is what I'm getting from all the replies here.
Click to expand...
Just FYI, some of the WD Blue drives do have a bug of sorts where you actually want to disable write caching. It was discussed a bit on my discord server but I did not test it myself (I have an SN580, but it's a portable game drive for a Steam Deck). Looking at your reply above, it seems like you came across this information. I can verify that we've had users that needed to do this for proper write speeds in scenarios like the one you describe.
 
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NeoGunHero said:
I'm going to do some testing, but I need some help with the method. After more research on this particular WD Blue SN570 drive, a lot of people have the same issue. However, they say to disable Write Caching when downloading, then turn it back on when gaming.

If I do this and the download speed works, how can I test performance of the drive while gaming? Is there a real-time monitoring program I could use?
Click to expand...
Play your games turn caching on/off see if you can tell a diff.
 
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