Team Group T-Force Cardea M.2 NVMe SSD Review (240GB)

T-FORCE CARDEA COOLING

Team Group claims that it’s patented heatsink can increase the radiating performance of this SSD by 15%, with its patented gaming fins capable of cooling the SSD down by 30DegC in an open space and 10DegC in a closed space.  They have supplied a temperature chart to assist:

 ATTO DISK BENCHMARK VER. 3.05

ATTO Disk Benchmark is perhaps one of the oldest benchmarks going and is definitely the main staple for manufacturer performance specifications. ATTO uses RAW or compressible data and, for our benchmarks, we use a set length of 256mb and test both the read and write performance of various transfer sizes ranging from 0.5 to 8192kb. Manufacturers prefer this method of testing as it deals with raw (compressible) data rather than random (includes incompressible data) which, although more realistic, results in lower performance results.

A bit odd are the initial results we are seeing, considering their listed specifications for the Cardea are 2.6GB/s read and 1.4GB/s write.  As you can see by ATTO, we have achieved 2.9GB/s and 2.3GB/s with pretty healthy low 4kb transfer speeds both above 4ooMB/s.  These are compressible results, however, and Team Group may be relying on their incompressible performance, going against the industry norm of using ATTO for determining performance specifications.  This is a definite plus.

CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 5.2.1 X64

Crystal Disk Benchmark is used to measure read and write performance through sampling of random data which is, for the most part, incompressible. Performance is virtually identical, regardless of data sample so we have included only that using random data samples.

That’s more like it.  High sequential read and write performance is dead on with listed specs and the low 4K random write performance is a very healthy 177MB/s.

AS SSD BENCHMARK VER 1.9

The toughest benchmark available for solid state drives is AS SSD as it relies solely on incompressible data samples when testing performance. For the most part, AS SSD tests can be considered the ‘worst case scenario’ in obtaining data transfer speeds and many enthusiasts like AS SSD for their needs. Transfer speeds are displayed on the left with IOPS results on the right.

 

 Taking a close look at the AS SSD performance, we can see that high sequential throughput write performance has dropped just a bit, but the 4K IOPS at 198K read and 165K write once again betters listed specs.