TeamGroup T-Force Liquid NVMe SSD review

Memory (DDR4/DDR5) and Storage (SSD/NVMe) 367 Page 19 of 19 Published by

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Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

How good or how bad a product always depends on several factors. As such the three primary factors are price, performance and endurance are key in the SSD segment. The results for the Cardea Liquid are a bit all over the place really. In massive sustained writes, it'll run out of cache buffer after roughly 18GB written. You'll drop from 2 GB/s towards 600 MB/sec, quite a difference. So the question, how often do you write such large files? If that answer is very little, then the Cardea Liquid is going to kick butt in terms of value for money. TBW values are good as well, the tested 512GB version is rated 800 Terabyte written before cells deplete and yes 1665 TBW for the 1 TB model.


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Liquid or a heatsink?

That liquid cooling. Admittedly it works, but it will work as long as your coolant is at a cool enough level. Team group places a relatively small 'container' holding coolant on top of the SSD. In heavy conditions, the heat from the SSD will be transferred fast and swiftly towards the coolant. But it is that stage that I weary a bit. So if you have long and harsh workloads all of the time, how will that coolant cool itself? I mean there's no radiator and the plexiglass casing surely won't help to cool it down either. 

So for normal usage with gaming and your average PC workloads, this will be fine. However, if you put heaps of stress on this SSD for a long time, that heat might get trapped at the coolant level. So normal and gaming usage, no worries ... but heavy pro-workloads yeah here I'd more quickly opt a heatsink design as the airflow can move away from that heat much faster. 

Performance

Technologies like TLC and QLC face some challenges writing more bits per cell of NAND, we noticed a dropoff in performance with mixed heavy workloads that exceed writing 18 Gigabyte continuously. After you pass that value of writes (and I do mean continuous sustained/linear writes minute after minute), then the SSD buffer is full and start to write directly to TLC NAND. Here perf can drop substantially. This, in a nutshell, is what you need to be aware of with TLC and QLC SSDs. IOPS performance is good on this unit, really good. The overall workload traces also indicate this SSD to be extremely capable and fast. Out of the dozens of SSDs we have tested, this one makes the top 10 (until you run out of that buffer).

Concluding

The 512 GB unit we tested today is going to cost roughly 90 USD/EUR (street price). So per GB that is close to 18 cents. And that is a good value, to be honest, the new liquid cooling design obviously ads a tiny price increase. That liquid cooling will work lovely for short bursts in workload. We, however, are afraid that with massively long workloads, the coolant could heat up and trap that heat, as there is no real way to dissipate that heat from the chamber that holds the fluid in a fast manner. In our testing we did not run into any issues, that has to be said, but there will be a threshold somewhere and we think that with a proper heatsink type cooler heat can be exhausted way faster thanks to airflow. I could recommend the Cardea Liquid for any DIY PC builder and gamer, the price really is not bad and you do add something unique into your PC. The performance is really good, unless you write many gigabytes continuously, as there the TLC write hole will kick in. But that is not different for competing products in this price range. Honestly, this product is cute and in a way innovative, however, the sheer fact of putting liquid into a container hovering over your motherboard might be the biggest restriction for many users. As much as, I like the idea, and as much as I like the performance I do doubt that Liquid-cooled M2 units will become popular. But Kudos to TeamGroup for bringing some innovation towards a saturated market. And overall as an SSD, this certainly is a nice performing series.

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