Question Samsung 860 Pro SATA SSD vs DRAM-less m2 NVM.e SSD as OS drive?

[jrichrds]

I'm running a 1TB Samsung 860 Pro Sata SSD as my boot drive, and am curious if the current generation of DRAM-less m2 NVM.e SSDs have advanced enough to be considered an overall better option as a boot drive. I have a spare 1TB Western Digital SN530 NVM.e SSD I was going to use as a storage drive, but thought of making it my boot drive and my Samsung Pro Sata SSD as my storage drive.

 

[Tech Junky]

I found the sn770 to be faster in my TB4 enclosure than any of my higher end drives. Dramless drives are a bit quirky in how they handle data. I would try it out and see how it performs but either way it will be faster than SATA by 5x. They leverage the ram of the system so if you have plenty it would be like a pricier drive.

 

[coercitiv]

I have a spare 1TB Western Digital SN530 NVM.e SSD I was going to use as a storage drive, but thought of making it my boot drive and my Samsung Pro Sata SSD as my storage drive.

Looking at the specs for each drive, the 1TB SN530 can offer up to 4X the Random IOPS over the 860 Pro. The sequential performance is also on another level, I would expect at least 2X higher performance for light workloads. Even for intensive & sustained workloads the SN530 is likely to outperform by leveraging higher interface bandwidth and lower NVME overhead. It may be DRAM-less, but "brute force" is a lot higher nowadays.

 

[aigomorla]

nVME always for boot drive.

DRAM is mostly used when writing to the drive.
Most of the time the OS is doing more reading more then writing, which then as coercitiv states, the brute force approach is several magnitudes higher.
Use the PRO as a storage drive, unless you need an insane amount of IOPs like a render box, or your doing massive SQL database.
But then you probably want a nVME with DRAM as those two require almost an equal amount of reads and writes.

 

[jrichrds]

Thanks for the great info guys!

 

[mikeymikec]

I've seen systems with dramless SSDs get as slow as hell during a sustained transfer (and the write performance dropping sharply), and I've never seen a system with an 860 PRO suffer from that in the same circumstances, so I'd stay with the 860 PRO hands down.