On 2023-01-02 23:45, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
... If you want a really good SSD, you want one with DRAM. Unfortunately they seem to be quite a bit more expensive. A 500G Crucial MX500 is $69.99 at Canada Computers (much worse on Amazon.ca). The 1TB MX500 is 101.50 at Amazon.ca.
Why would they add DRAM to the SSD itself? Buffering writes so it can report success sooner? What if you have a crash or shutdown before the flash write actually happens? This sounds like a misfeature designed to beat benchmarks. Back in the Unix days the rule of thumb said that adding more RAM to a system was the most effective way of improving performance. I believe that's still true and maxing out the system DRAM on your Linux box's motherboard remains high on the list of things to do to get more out of the system. BTW, crying over those prices sounds like 21st century first-world problems, considering the princely ransoms we paid for wee fractions of that much storage back in the day, or being in awe of the first sysadmin on Usenet who was running a Terabyte Array in their datacentre. Anthony