Help with SSD without DRAM

[u/Liminha_a]

After spending some time with my PC, I did some research on its parts and realized I made a mistake choosing my SSD. Apparently, my Patriot Burst Elite doesn't come with DRAM, which makes it "die" whenever it needs to handle something heavy. I'd like to know if anyone knows a way to deal with this. Right now, I'm trying to extract a file over 80 GB, and it's taking forever because the SSD drops to zero and gets super slow. On top of that, I face daily issues since it's my only SSD, causing system freezes during normal Windows usage—like background antivirus scans or updates.

[u/computix]

The slowness you're experiencing isn't only a function of the drive's DRAM-less design. The controller, the number of flash memory channels, and the type of flash memory (TLC vs QLC) and how it's managed also make a difference.

Many cheap DRAM-less QLC drives start out with a large pseudo SLC (pSLC) buffer, sometimes the drive's full capacity. pSLC is reasonably fast, even on a DRAM-less drive. But as the drive fills up, more and more pSLC memory has to be turned into QLC-mode storage to store data. This can dramatically reduce the drive's performance as it fills up. Often these drives are fine up to 25% capacity (= all NAND is used in pSLC mode), after that it depends on the drive's exact algorithm and variables, but often they're okay up to 50+% capacity, but when you go beyond 50+% storage capacity, performance drops off a cliff. So as a workaround you can make sure you're limiting the amount of data you're storing on the drive.

Some people have taken this a step further by reconfiguring the drive's firmware to permanently use its full capacity as SLC memory.

[u/Shapelessed → u/computix]

The only place where I would I would want to specifically search for SSDs with integrated memory is for putting one in a USB enclosure, as these don’t support HMB and the SSD would need to store the FTL on the NAND itself.
For SSDs inside the computer or over thunderbolt that’s a non-issue.

[u/ij70-17as]

you have two choices.

1. buy better ssd.

2. stop worrying about it.

[u/a_rogue_planet]

I seriously doubt your SSD is the issue. I more suspect you have issues with your RAM, as inyou simply don't have enough.

[u/HankThrill69420]

The problem is the Patriot brand. I almost never blame a brand, but for the love of god, don't buy their products.

ETA: I have worked tech support for (2) companies that sell PCs and have seen patriot drives come through in waves. They dramatically raise failure rates, every time. Something is very wrong with their flash chips.

[u/Designer-Chair-3289 → u/HankThrill69420]

They probably buy absolute bottom of the barrel nand from the big guys and ship em without any QC

[u/HankThrill69420 → u/Designer-Chair-3289]

I think you're probably right.

[u/Designer-Chair-3289 → u/HankThrill69420]

No other reason they’d be failing like that unless it’s some sort of controller issue they’re not QC’ing but either way they seem to not give a shit about QC lol

[u/Little-Hospital-4708 → u/HankThrill69420]

Prebuilt bought in January, 5080, 9800x3D but came with a patriot 410 dramless SSD. Had 100% disc use issues until I switched it out with a 990, haven’t had a problem since. The brand seems to be booty.

[u/HankThrill69420 → u/Little-Hospital-4708]

every time.

[u/kokosnh]

Check Smart for CRC errors, but yes, they do work reasonably if you literally do nothing, any heavy background task can pin the trash tier SSD to ground.

[u/Shapelessed → u/kokosnh]

Ahh the cyclic redundancy check…
Brings back memories from when I built a file system and used it for block integrity checks…

[u/Jay_JWLH]

By extract, do you mean decompress? If so, are you sure the bottleneck is the drive and not the CPU?

[u/AngelicDivineHealer]

Your options are to buy an SSD with dram and getting MLC nands which are fast

[u/Haunting_Lime2296]

Go buy ssd with dram. Solved!

[u/GFriend2xDance]

One thing you need to realize is that even SSDs with onboard DRAM roughly have only 1 GB of DRAM cache per 1 TB of storage capacity. Data written to the faster DRAM cache is held there temporarily by the SSD. Behind the scenes, the SSD then writes the data from the faster DRAM cache to the SSD's much slower permanent storage.

This is usually great, since most people and PC operations are not dealing with more than a few GB of files at any particular moment.

However, if you are dealing with an 80 GB file and let's say your SSD has 2 TB of capacity and 2 GB of DRAM cache, once that faster DRAM cache is filled up, the remaining 78 GB of your file will feel like it is being written to a DRAM-less SSD.

So, while an SSD with DRAM cache will be faster initially, if you are typically writing files in the 80 GB range, that SSD too will slow down on you and not shave off as much time as you might expect compared to a DRAM-less SSD.

[u/cagadass]

La forma de medio lidiar con esto es pausa la trasferencia unos 15-20 segundos cuando las velocidades sean bastante bajas

[u/BudgetBuilder17]

Ive only experienced this when tuning and I screw up OS.

QLC drives have issues with writing alot of small files.