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On our test bench today is the TeamGroup T-FORCE CARDEA Ceramic C440 Gen 4 NVMe M.2 SSD. This SSD sports an off-white color pattern with gold branding and is a bit different than other SSDs we have tested, in that it contains a ceramic plate heatsink. This is a bit unusual as, well at least until Sabrent came along with their copper colored metal heatsink, the SSD industry (for the most part) settled with a very basic adhesive based paper branding. This has been a logical step in moving to Gen 4 SSDs given respect to the increased temperatures we have seen come along with increased data transfer speeds.
Our SSD sample is of a 2TB capacity and this SSD utilizes the Phison E16 which is based on a component build that TeamGroup believes will meet the needs of gamers everywhere. We found that this SSD fit perfectly in our ASRock X570 Creator motherboard with their integrated Gen 4 heatsink, however, it was a tight fit on a different motherboard sample, the MSI MPG X570 Gaming Pro Carbon, and we had to remove the ceramic branding for proper installation which wasn’t too difficult.
The TeamGroup T-FORCE CARDEA C440 SSD is a PCIe 4.0 x4 (four lane) M.2 SSD that is of the 2280 (80mm) factor and utilizes NVMe 1.3 protocol. It is available in one and two terabyte capacities, both with identical specifications of 5GB/s read, 4.4GB/s write and up to 750K read and write IOPS at low 4k random disk access. This SSD has a limited 5-year warranty which is accompanied by a 1800TBW (terabytes written) rating for the 1TB capacity, and doubled to 3600TBW for 2TB.
The C440 is based on the Phison PS5016-E16 NVMe 8-channel controller along with four pieces of Kioxia 96-layer TLC NAND flash memory, each having a base capacity of 512GB for a total of 2TB. Formatted, this SSD provides the user with 1863GB of storage space for their use.
The TeamGroup T-FORCE CARDEA C440 NVMe SSD is also a two-sided SSD, each side containing a SKHynix DDR4 DRAM chip of 512MB, for a 1GB DRAM buffer for each GB of SSD size.
TeamGroup also has a S.M.A.R.T. SSD Software program which provides Disk Info, System Info and Performance, the latter being displayed as such:
Checking Amazon, we find pricing for the T-FORCE CARDEA C440 NVMe SSD at $184.99 for the 1TB version, and $364.99 for 2TB.