The T-Force Cardea A440 Pro Special Series SSD from TeamGroup is “Made for the PS5”, but it also works well with laptops and desktop PCs. In our tests, the PCIe 4.0 drive performed well, however its overall throughput fell short of its advertised rates.

TEAMGROUP T-FORCE CARDEA A440 PRO SPECIAL SERIES SPECS

The TeamGroup T-Force Cardea A440 Pro Special Series ($359.99 for 2TB as tested) is the newest of several M.2 internal solid-state drives we’ve reviewed that tout PlayStation 5 compatibility. It complies with for use with a PS5 console as well as a desktop or laptop computer, albeit the latter two will require PCI Express 4.0 compatibility to get the most out of the SSD’s performance. In most of our tests, that performance was satisfactory, however it fell short of the rated sequential read and write speeds. Although the Special Series cannot compete with the Editors’ Choice award-winning , it is reasonably priced and worth considering.

Primed for the PS5

The Cardea A440 Pro Special Series is an M.2 SSD advertised primarily for PS5 compatibility—its label specifically says Pro Special 5eries. While some PS5-compatible M.2 drives, such as the NVMe SSD, have heat shields that make them taller and fit more snugly into the console, the T-Force does so with plenty of room to spare (just over 5mm, based on provided by TeamGroup).

The A440 Pro Special Series is a 96-layer triple-level-cell (TLC) 3D NAND flash internal SSD. It’s based on a Phison E18 controller and runs on a four-lane PCI Express 4.0 bus using the NVMe 1.4 protocol. The M.2 Type-2280 (80mm long) “gumstick” format used by the drive is common among late-model internal SSDs. (Are you new to some of this jargon? (For a dictionary of SSD words, see our glossary.)

The Special Series, which comes in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities, is competitively priced when compared to its competitors. The ADATA S70 Blade, among other PS5-compatible drives we’ve evaluated, costs 20 cents per gigabyte in both 1TB and 2TB capacities, while the WD Black SN850 costs 25 cents per gig for 1TB and 22 cents for 2TB.

TeamGroup T-Pressure A440 Professional Particular Collection Configurations

Together with the Particular Collection, there are two different drives within the Cardea A440 Professional steady. An analogous mannequin, additionally using a graphene warmth spreader, sells for $169.99 for 1TB, $359.99 for 2TB, and $909.99 for 4TB, whereas a model with an aluminum heatsink too massive for the PlayStation 5’s SSD set up area of interest lists for $179.99, $369, and $919.99 in the identical relative capacities. (The unique , which incorporates a graphene warmth spreader and a bigger aluminum heatsink, lists for 23 cents per gigabyte for its 1TB mannequin and 24 cents per gig for 2TB.)

A drive’s sturdiness is measured in terabytes written (TBW), a producer’s estimate of how a lot of knowledge could be written to a drive over its lifetime earlier than some cells start to fail and get taken out service. TBW tends to scale 1:1 with capability, as with the A440 Professional Particular Collection. Its rankings of 700TBW for 1TB and 1,400TBW for the 2TB model we examined vary for drives primarily based on TLC reminiscence. The is rated at 800TB for its 1TB stick and 1,600TBW for the 2TB mannequin, and the Gammix S70 Blade’s rankings are 740TBW for 1TB and 1,480TBW for 2TB. The and the Silicon Energy US70 are simultaneously high, durability-wise, with rankings of 1,800TBW for 1TB and three,600TBW for 2TB. 

TeamGroup’s guarantee for the drive is sweet for five years or till you hit the rated TBW determine in writes, whichever comes first. Until you write large quantities of knowledge to the SSD, the guarantee should expire earlier than you attain the TBW restrict.

Under PCI Express 4.0, the Cardea A440 Pro Special Series scored well.

We test all of our PCI Specific 4. Zero SSDs on a desktop PC with an MSI Godlike X570 motherboard and CPU. The testbed has 16GB of Corsair Dominator DDR4 reminiscence clocked to three,600MHz and employs an Nvidia GeForce graphics card for show output. 

Crystal DiskMark 6.0, PCMark 10 Storage, and AS-SSD were used to run the A440 Pro Special Series through our standard series of internal solid-state drive benchmarks. The sequential speed tests in Crystal DiskMark simulate best-case, straight-line transfers of big data, providing a standard measure of drive throughput.

The A440 Pro Special Series’ write and especially read rates in our Crystal DiskMark sequential speed tests were significantly lower than its ratings, albeit the drive is still extremely fast—say, in the second tier of the best PCIe 4.0 SSDs we compared it against. Its 4K read speeds were below average, but its 4K writes were faster than normal. Its ISO speed score was around average in AS-SSD copy testing, and its program and game loading rates were on the slow side.

Recent high-end PCI Express 4.0 M.2 drives have performed admirably in the PCMark 10 benchmark, which measures a drive’s speed in a variety of everyday operations such as copying folders, loading data, games, creative programs, and running Windows 10. The PCMark 10 total score of the A440 Pro Special Series was remarkable, but just in the middle of these SSD speedsters. In the Windows 10 boot test, it was one of four drives with similar scores at the top of the class. The rest of its PCMark 10 software loading scores, as well as its ISO and file copy results, were mediocre.

A Low-Cost M.2 Drive for the PS5 or PC

The far-from-secret weapon of the Cardea A440 Pro Special Series is that it easily meets Sony’s requirements for M.2 drives that operate with the PlayStation 5, fitting into the console with plenty of room to spare thanks to its thin graphene heat spreader. It had good performance numbers, with a respectable PCMark 10 overall score reflecting its speed in loading programs and other tasks. While its Crystal DiskMark sequential read and write scores fell short of its advertised speeds, they nevertheless put it among the fastest PCI Express 4.0 SSDs we’ve tested.

The ADATA S70 Blade and WD Black SN850, two other explicitly PS5-friendly drives we’ve evaluated, both performed admirably in our tests. Unlike the T-Force SSD, they successfully equaled or exceeded their sequential speed ratings as determined by Crystal DiskMark, making them the first two drives to achieve read speeds of over 7,000MBps. The Editors’ Choice-winning S70 Blade, which has the highest sequential read and write ratings we’ve ever seen, also comes with a powerful software suite and 256-bit AES hardware-based encryption, so it’s still our top choice. The A440 Pro Special Series, on the other hand, is a capable drive at a slightly reduced cost.