Jumpexx

Thinking about a 2TB Gen4 NVMe for a fresh Steam/Epic library. The DRAM-less drives are noticeably cheaper, and a few folks say HMB makes the difference basically disappear for games. Others swear DRAM-less is a trap once you start installing 100GB+ titles or moving stuff around. What's the real-world take here? This is mostly a game drive, maybe some photo imports. Not a scratch disk for video editing. Am I overthinking it?

First, off-topic but the Under-desk cable management: trays, baskets, or straight-up chaos — what actually held up after a year? thread Under-desk cable management: trays, baskets, or straight-up chaos — what actually held up after a year? is still the only cable advice that survived my last rebuild. Now, DRAM-less! For a pure game library it's usually fine because reads are mostly sequential-ish and the OS caches a lot. BUT if you install and unpack big games back-to-back, HMB drives can fall on their face once the SLC cache fills. Have you tried looking at sustained write reviews rather than ATTO numbers? That's where the real difference shows up!

Yeah, agreed with GhostSFF — for games, DRAM-less is mostly fine. I ran a 2TB HMB drive as a Steam library for a year and never noticed load times vs my DRAM drive. The only time it annoyed me was moving a 200GB folder from my NAS. Got slow and warm. For the money, I'd still take a decent DRAM-less Gen4 over a sketchy no-name DRAM drive.