With or without DRAM, both of these super fast 2 TB SSDs are great value for money at just 7 cents per GB
Lexar NM790 | 2 TB | NVMe | PCIe 4.0 | 7,400 MB/s read | 6,500 MB/s write | $153 $139.99 at Amazon (save $13.01)
This is pretty much the best value 2 TB SSD around right now, with an ideal balance of price tag and performance. If you need one with a heatsink, then they're $20 more on Amazon.
Price check: Newegg $149.99
Lexar NM800 Pro| 2 TB | NVMe | PCIe 4.0 | 7,500 MB/s read | 6,500 MB/s write | $249.99$144.99 at B&H Photo (save $75)
On paper, it's very similar to the NM790, but the extra cash you need to hand over gets you 2 GB of DRAM. This really helps when writing huge amounts of data to the drive.
Price check: Newegg $190.75 | Amazon $154.99
Lexar's NM790 is a brilliant NVMe PCIe 4.0 gaming SSD, as it offers great performance for a very reasonable price, as we discovered when wereviewed the 4 TB version. It doesn't have the very latest flash memory and controller chips, but the whole setup is very balanced and Lexar has done a fine job of configuring everything to work well.
There are, of course, better gaming SSDs but they're more expensive and the NM790 should be more than quick enough for most gamers. What it doesn't have, though, is a very large cache. Let me explain.
NAND flash, the type of memory that's used in SSDs, isn't super quick, especially when being written to. So when you're trying to get lots of files copied from your PC's system RAM onto the drive, the data needs to be buffered somewhere to stop things slowing to a crawl. And the table that stores the locations of where everything is on the SSD also needs to be constantly updated.
So-called DRAM-less SSDs, like the NM790, use a portion of the host memory, or system RAM, for storing the tables, allowing them to be checked and changed far quicker than they would if they were kept in the flash memory. Such SSDs are further sped up by dedicating a portion of the flash memory as a pseudo-version of a faster NAND type, typically known as an SLC cache.
The NM790 has an SLC cache around 280 GB in size
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