Teamgroup Cardea A440 2TB NVMe SSD review - Introduction

TeamGroup T-Force Cardea Graphene A440 2TB M2 SSD (PCIe Gen 4.0)
Breaching 7 GB/sec M.2.Class SSD performance for a mainstream price

Teamgroup released their super high-performance A440 M.2 NVMe SSD series. Powered by a vigorously fast PS5018-E18 controller, this Cardea series product is close to one of the most compelling SSDs we' have tested in a while. If you like endurance and PCIe 4.0 performance levels breaching 7 GB/sec, of course. Teamgroup has become a reputable company over the past few years; here at Guru3D, we review a lot of their storage and memory products.

Today, the product tested can be spotted for 429 USD/EUR (MSRP) for 2TB, including a heatsink module. That number rounded up to equals close to 21 cents per GB. And while that might seem a tad on the high side for NAND storage these days, you need to realize this is a TLC written NVMe SSD that has been fitted with Phison's fastest Phison E18 controller, capable of reaping devastation inside that storage array of yours in terms of performance.

As you guys know, Teamgroup offers a wide variety of TLC and QLC based products; we tested many of their PCIe Gen 3 and Gen 4 flavored products. But for those that want top-notch high-performance at a fair price, this PCIe Gen 4 x4 M2 unit might be what you are after. The A440 is available in two volumes sizes. We received the 2TB version, but there's a 1 TB model also. Team is claiming numbers that run into the 7000 MB/s, Write Speeds, and up to 6900 MB/s for these M2 SSDs, priced at that 20 cents per GB. They offer a proper 5 years warranty (you do need to register your product for that). The TBW (TeraBytes Written—the total amount of data that a company is willing to guarantee can be written to the drive) rated 700 TBW for the 1 TB model and a proper 1400 TBW for the tested 2 TB model. 

The specs are exceptional but will this unit deliver what it claims? SSD is based on this year's trendy 8-channel Phison's PS5018-E18 controller and, of course, has been fitted with TLC written NAND from Micron (96 layers). The performance will vary slightly depending on volume size; the more significant, the faster, though. The SSD is a Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe 1.4) M.2 2280 form factor SSD. The performance numbers of a proper SATA3 SSD offers these days are simply excellent, but with the more niche NVMe SSDs you can multiply performance 14x, and that offers serious numbers. The unit follows a smaller M.2 2280 form factor (8cm), so it will fit on most ATX motherboards capable of M.2 just fine. Anyway, wanna see how fast it really is? Will this be a proper Samsung 980 PRO competitor? Next page and onwards into the review then.