It's the frustrating reality for many gamers: the box of the drive flaunts a speed of 3000 MB/s, but as soon as it comes to downloading a major update for Dead by Daylight or Cyberpunk, Steam shows a write speed of 15 MB/s and your drive runs permanently at 100%. Welcome to the world of DRAM-less SSD drives.
How Steam and Epic Updates Work
When downloading an update, platforms like Steam don't download the whole game again. They only download a smaller data package, but then they open the massive game files on your drive, scan them, and physically inject these new fragments of data into them. This process is called "patching" or "pre-allocating."
This is absolute hell for the drive. It's not a steady write of one large movie (where the drive reaches 3000 MB/s), but sequential reading, erasing, and writing of a massive number of tiny pinhead-sized pieces of data across the drive's entire capacity at once.
The Problem with Cheap Drives: They Lack DRAM
For an SSD to know where it stored specific files, it contains a so-called map (a translation table). High-quality and slightly more expensive drives have this map stored in their own ultra-fast memory = DRAM Cache.
The cheapest drives on the market don't have this memory ("DRAM-less"). They have the map stored directly on the slow drive cells themselves, or (in an attempt to save money) they bite off pieces of your computer's RAM (so-called HMB technology).
Comparison of a 10 GB Update: Drive with DRAM vs Without DRAM
Pricier SSD (With DRAM)
- File map is in super-fast memory
- Steam knows instantly where to put data
- Result: Update is done in 1 minute
Cheapest SSD (DRAM-less)
- Drive constantly gets lost in the file map
- Once the buffer (SLC Cache) fills up, speed drops below the level of platter HDDs
- Result: Drive runs at 100% load and 1 minute easily turns into half an hour
One More Problem: Speed Drop After Filling
If you fill a super-cheap DRAM-less SSD over approx. 80%, its controller loses the ability to efficiently move data around and its speed will often permanently collapse to 10-20 MB/s. Windows OS will start to stutter.
How to Avoid the Trap When Buying?
Manufacturers of cheap drives deliberately hide this information from consumers in tiny print. It won't say "DRAM-less" on the box.
You have to find it either in expert reviews or by hunting down the datasheet (detailed specifications) for the specific model. If you see a 1TB version of a PCIe 4.0 SSD suspiciously cheap on sale, cheaper than proven drives by giants like Samsung 980 Pro / WD Black SN850 / Kingston KC3000, you'll likely run into exactly this problem.
Rule for Gamers
If you're buying a small drive just for an office PC for emails and web browsing, a DRAM-less SSD is perfectly enough. But as soon as you install giant 200GB open-world games and want smoothness without stuttering = always pay extra for a model with an integrated DRAM cache.
Solve the Space Problem for Good
Instead of battling updates, make sure you have a large enough gigabyte reserve on a reliable drive.
Launch DiskPlannerThe Double Burden: Downloading and Unpacking
One of the hidden traps that game clients (Steam, Epic, Xbox App) rarely warn you about is how they handle massive game patches. A notorious example is the game Path of Exile. When the client downloads a huge 30 GB package, it saves the compressed files into a temporary "downloading" folder. At this point, your game hasn't actually been updated yet.
The second, much more brutal step is the "unpacking" (patching) phase, where the client applies the downloaded chunks to your existing game files. To prevent data corruption in case of a crash or power loss, clients often create temporary, full-size identical copies of the massive database files being modified (like huge .pak or .vpk archives). To apply a 50 GB patch, the game client might easily swallow up to 130 GB of total temporary space! Once the operation finishes, it deletes the temp files. If your cheap 500GB SSD is 95% full, this patching process will violently stop, corrupt your game, or throttle download speeds to 0 bytes per second.
Moving Steam Libraries: The Art of Drive Juggling
The ideal strategy for players on a budget is combining a smaller, ultra-fast NVMe M.2 drive for your operating system and current main games, with an older but massive 4TB spinning HDD (or cheap SATA SSD) for cold storage. While playing modern massive blockbusters like Cyberpunk 2077 on an archaic HDD will obviously cause hellish stutters and unplayable frame rates, there is absolutely no rule saying you can't park those games there indefinitely in a "freezer."
Steam seamlessly allows you to move existing installations between drives without tedious redownloading: just right-click your game, select Properties > Installed Files > Move Install Folder. Beating a giant game, shoving it off your premium fast NVMe onto the slow 4TB drive (where it remains securely updated but tucked away), is undoubtedly the most archetypal behavior of any gamer who has mastered modern disk space planning.