I'm looking for advice on whether my setup with three cheap, dram-less 2TB SSDs for storing my games is adequate. I tend to fill these drives almost to their limits, leaving only about 100GB of free space on each. While I do have a solid Samsung SSD for my operating system, I'm concerned about potential performance issues with loading and streaming games from these nearly full SSDs. Is it true that having dram makes a significant difference in this scenario, and does filling up these drives affect their speed?
5 Answers
For most games, especially those you only play casually, not having dram isn't a deal breaker. I have some drives without it myself, and they perform just fine. You should notice negligible differences in loading times.
You're good! Having around 100GB free space is usually enough to avoid problems. For gaming, the lack of dram isn't a big issue either—lots of folks use dram-less drives without any significant drawbacks for game storage.
It's generally recommended to keep 10-20% free on your drives, but for game storage, being around 10% free is often fine since games don't require constant small reads and writes like some other applications might.
There's definitely a difference when games get frequent updates. My brother had a high-end laptop with a dram-less drive, and he'd struggle with updates eating into our game time. I switched to a better one, and it's made all the difference for multitasking.
Just to clarify, game drives aren't constantly writing data very fast, so filling them up isn't a huge danger if you're mindful of your important files on other drives. I've got a Samsung 999 Evo Pro for my games and it works great without proper dram.
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