Teamgroup Cardea Z44Q 4TB NVMe SSD review - Specifications & Features

Specifications & Features

NAND flash memory (the storage memory used inside an SSD) has become cheaper thanks to the new 64/96-layer fabrication and this year we noticed a move to QLC NAND as well. MLC writes 2 bits per cell, TLC 3 bits per cell, and QLC four bits per cell. You can see both the complication and advantage here, you can store more data in the NAND cells, increasing volume sizes. But you can also see a performance hit with an increasing write bottleneck (which you can buffer with SLC cached, DRAM or Host Memory Buffer on NVMe). Endurance is also a factor, there should be less of it however with modern age wear and care technologies it still is not an issue. Team will offer the series fitted with vertical stacked (3D) NAND, written as QLC, these units receive a proper 5-year warranty. 

Phison PS5016-E16 controller

AMD committed $15 million in the development of the PS5016-E16 controller, according to the latest information. Phison's PS5016-E16 SSD controller was the first PCIe 4.0 compliant SSD controller to be announced, and it is built using a 28 nm technology. It supports up to 8 channels of flash memory connections and can accommodate up to 8TB of NAND storage. A DRAM cache has a capacity that is one-hundredth of the overall NAND storage capacity. Because two DRAMs (4GB x 2) are required to handle 8TB, and so on, the maximum capacity of ordinary installed devices is currently limited to 4TB at present time. NVMe SSDs have nominal read and write speeds of approximately 5000 and 4400 MB/s, respectively, according to industry standards. This is approximately 40 percent quicker than the high-end class SSD with PCIe 3.0 x4 technology.