Some SSDs borrow your PC’s RAM to stay fast, and I tested the tradeoff

I always considered “no DRAM” a deal-breaker when buying an SSD. I thought a cheap drive without that chip made sense only if speed really didn’t matter. Then I bought a $50 DRAM-less drive and installed it as secondary storage, and its performance for my daily workflow matched drives that cost more than twice as much. This led me to investigate Host Memory Buffer and then put the drive through a side-by-side test against a DRAM-equipped SSD. The results changed my criteria for buying an SSD.