4TB Crucial P3 Plus PCIe 4.0 is $265

chameleoneel

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Its DRAM-less, so sustained Writes will be BAD, after it writes about 500GB sustained. That's actually the 2TB drive. The 4TB may have a larger cache.
 
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I am guessing the Gen 3 version is probably also Dram-less
It's been $249 for a week or so now.
https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-PCIe-NAND-NVMe-3500MB/dp/B0B25P44CL

It looks like DRAM is used for storing the data table of the NAND flash and not used for cache when writing data. SLC Cache is what you want on an SSD with TLC or QLC Nand.

 
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I am guessing the Gen 3 version is probably also Dram-less
It's been $249 for a week or so now.
https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-PCIe-NAND-NVMe-3500MB/dp/B0B25P44CL

It looks like DRAM is used for storing the data table of the NAND flash and not used for cache when writing data. SLC Cache is what you want on an SSD with TLC or QLC Nand.


I believe sustained writes will still tank at some point, tho I could be wrong (haven't looked into reviews lately). All I know is my server has a 120gb M.2 NVME drive with no DRAM (not needed in my situation, OS drive is rarely touched) the write speed will tank on the rare occasion I copy a large file or two to it.
 
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Indeed, Crucial P3 Plus PCIe 4.0, to title of this thread, will have awful sustained writes, after it writes about 500GB sustained. That's actually the 2TB drive. The 4TB may have a larger cache.
 
My dram-less team group 2.5” SSD and sustained writes stink. Even downloading a new game on steam makes the writes drop way down. The drive throttles the download and makes it spike up and down as its cache gets full and frees up. Where as a spinner drive or a dram ssd doesn’t do this, i get a steady download speed and write stream. I swore off dram-less drives based on that experience, but are these getting better?
 
My dram-less team group 2.5” SSD and sustained writes stink. Even downloading a new game on steam makes the writes drop way down. The drive throttles the download and makes it spike up and down as its cache gets full and frees up. Where as a spinner drive or a dram ssd doesn’t do this, i get a steady download speed and write stream. I swore off dram-less drives based on that experience, but are these getting better?
A. Some NVME SSD will use the system RAM, if they don't have their own DRAM. Its slower, but prevents erratic performance

B. You were likelyi experiencing that issue because SATA SSD aren't very fast, even at full performance. When they run out of cache and tank----their performance is below the speed of your internet. For a decent DRAM-less PCIe 4.0 NVME, even its worst performance (probably ~600Mb/s) is still going to be better than your internet speed.

**Also, the cache on your drive must have been really small. Or the drive was already very full (The cache size available is based on how much free space of the drive is available). Because, usually the cache size should be plenty to handle downloading a game.
 
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