expiredlostinthesea posted Jul 30, 2025 03:34 AM
Item 1 of 3
Item 1 of 3
expiredlostinthesea posted Jul 30, 2025 03:34 AM
DoorDash DashPass Members: Best Buy: 1TB Samsung 990 EVO Plus PCIe 5.0 x2 M.2 SSD
(Valid for delivery orders only)$49
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Link was to one in New York, I had to manually search for a Best Buy near me.
Your concerns about using in an external enclosure bring up a good point about different use cases and compatibility. I also learned that some OS's don't support HMB so you wouldn't be able to use the drive at all. For light, casual computing tasks these drives should be fine. Anybody else should just get one with DRAM.
Your concerns about using in an external enclosure bring up a good point about different use cases and compatibility. I also learned that some OS's don't support HMB so you wouldn't be able to use the drive at all. For light, casual computing tasks these drives should be fine. Anybody else should just get one with DRAM.
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Your concerns about using in an external enclosure bring up a good point about different use cases and compatibility. I also learned that some OS's don't support HMB so you wouldn't be able to use the drive at all. For light, casual computing tasks these drives should be fine. Anybody else should just get one with DRAM.
DRAM/HMB are used to store a copy of the mapping table (FTL) and primarily benefit random reads. Aside from the PS5, what common OSs don't support HMB? Even without HMB support, that doesn't mean you can't use the drive. The vast majority of people would never notice a difference between a drive with DRAM and one using HMB.
All I know is from my own experience with the 990 Evo Plus on Windows 11, using this Gen 5 drive in a Gen 4 slot, the drive could not handle sustained write performance of large files. Apart from that I did not notice any difference when I tried it as an OS drive.
It appears MacOS does not natively support HMB, but as you said it can still use the drive (with some performance downside).
I'll still maintain that light computing users won't notice anything with DRAM-less drives. Any type of power-user, hobbyist, tinkerer, DIY-er, etc. that wants the best performance and flexibility for repurposing the drive later on, should just get a drive with DRAM.
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