Hi, I’ve been looking to upgrade from my HDD to an SSD. I was wondering whether it is worth it to spend the extra money for the 970 Evo/Evo Plus over the WD Blue SN550. Will there be a noticeable difference in boot up/general usage/gaming? I’ve heard that the WD does not have DRAM, is that significant?
Thanks!
I wouldn't say noticeable day to day, but Samsung should last longer.
If you've never had a SSD then either will feel amazing. Honestly, for general users NVMe SSDs are only benchmark/placebo faster than SATA ones. They boot windows faster that you can notice it without a stop watch, but compared to the jump from HDD to SATA SSD it is diminishing returns.
Now if you're video editing or 3D rendering or something, then you'll notice the speed.
I have a 500GB 970 Evo (non-Plus) as the boot drive in my PC (10600KF) and my daughter's PC has a 1TB WD Blue SN550 (R5 2600) and I can't tell boot time wise, though I haven't put a stopwatch on them. Also my games are on a secondary 2TB SATA SSD so I can't compare speeds there for you, but again I don't really notice anything regardless.
The DRAM helps with sequential writes the most, so like video editing or simply moving huge files around from one NVMe drive to another, or within the same NVMe drive, or something coming from RAM. They also keep a drive feeling faster when it is full and any SLC caching isn't able to be used.
The part about one NVMe to another or from RAM is critical, as no other storage or external communications medium you have will be as fast as either of those drives.
The big thing to watch out for with NVMe SSDs is the cheaper QLC ones end up unbelievably slow for sustained writes and slow down dramatically once full - like slower than good HDD speeds slow, painful for those used to proper SSDs, cause once you're used to SSD speed going back to HDDs is awful.
Where the QLC and many of the other DRAM-less TLC drives come to a crawl, the SN550 sticks to a tad below SATA SSD full speed (note they don't always stay at that full speed either) so it is one of the best DRAM-less drives out at the moment. Now the Evo is roughly twice as fast in this extended write workload (it's DRAM cache would be overwhelmed by this time, so it is more down how the controller talks to the flash) but is that a use case you'll run into a lot?
It is pretty long, but the Tom's Hardware review for the SN550 shows this pretty well in the "Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery" section, with graphs, to see what I mean about where the SN550 falls short. You'll note for the rest of the review it is slower than the Evo but the gap isn't as big and it is much closer to the EVO than SATA drives, but that is often true for the QLC + DRAM drives too.
TL;DR - for general use/gaming/boot up, you're unlikely to tell unless you have both of them and a stop watch. Being TLC, the horrific QLC write hole you may have heard about isn't there.
Thanks for such a detailed explanation! I think will go with the SN550 since I don't think I'll be taking much advantage of the 970's DRAM and maybe upgrade in 3 or 4 years to a PCIe 4 SSD when they go more mainstream and reduce in price (hopefully).
Head on over to toms hardware guide and see the reviews and compare the reviews to see which one you want or you may spot another one you want.