WD BLACK SN770 PCIe Gen4 NVMe M.2 Internal Solid State Drive: 1TB $68, 2TB Expired

Not true, that's a misconception that's likely based on outdated data points from years ago. DRAM-less SATA SSDs were generally a bit slower to boot an OS. With modern DRAM-less NVMe drives like the SN 770 black, it makes no difference for boot time. When Techpowerup did a full review last year, this one was among the fastest to bootup Windows: https://www.techpowerup.com/revie...-tb/8.html Funny enough, 3 of the top 6 boot times benchmarked at the time were all modern DRAM-less NVMe SSDs.

I currently have two of the cheaper SN 570 blue's and also installed an SN 770 black for a friend. All of our drives have been perfect for everyday usage (boot drive, gaming, productivity). The only main category where I see DRAM-less fall behind is with large sustained writes although it was plenty for me:

"Write speed starts out at well over 4.5 GB/s, which is sustained until 325 GB have been written to the drive. For a 1 TB SSD, this is a very big SLC cache as it spans pretty much the whole capacity of the drive. 325 GB of data written to TLC flash in SLC mode (which takes up 3x as much space) means 975 GB of TLC capacity are used. Once the SLC cache is full, write speeds drop a lot though, down to around 500 MB/s. Filling the whole 1 TB capacity completes at 630 MB/s on average, which is a decent result for a value-orientated SSD, but far from the 2 GB/s we're seeing on the best high-end Gen 4 drives. When write activity stops and the SLC cache has had time to free up some capacity, full write rates are restored even if the drive is partially filled."

TLDR: Probably no need to waste money by limiting your options to only DRAM NVMe SSDs

The SN850X is one of the fastest consumer SSDs available, but the NV770 is a solid mid-range performer, and most people probably won't notice a difference.

Who are you quoting?