> The assumption is simply false, and not due to the "SSD wear" argument. Many consumer SSDs, especially DRAMless ones (e.g., Apacer AS350 1TB, but also seen on Crucial SSDs), under synchronous writes, will regularly produce latency spikes of 10 seconds or more, due to the way they need to manage their cells. This is much worse than any HDD. If a DRAMless consumer SSD is all that you have, better use zram.

Do mind that DRAMless is much less of an issue on NVMe. NVMe can use Host Memory Buffer to use system RAM for its logic, which is still orders of magnitude faster than relying on the NAND.

DRAMless is strictly worse in every way on SATA, where you really don't want to use it if you can help it; on NVMe, the difference is more about having a bad lower-quality drive or a good higher-quality drive. Having DRAM is a good indicator of the drive being good as the manufacturer is unlikely to pair it with slow NAND and controller, but lacking it doesn't necessarily mean a drive will perform badly. When comparing drives between generations, DRAMless often ends up performing better, even in loaded scenarios, compared to an older drive with DRAM.