The Teamgroup Cardea Z44Q is a solid-state drive in the M.2 2280 form factor, launched on June 24th, 2021. It is available in capacities ranging from 2 TB to 4 TB. This page reports specifications for the 2 TB variant. With the rest of the system, the Teamgroup Cardea Z44Q interfaces using a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 connection. The SSD controller is the PS5016-E16-32 from Phison, a DRAM cache chip is available. Teamgroup has installed 96-layer QLC NAND flash on the Cardea Z44Q, the flash chips are made by Micron. To improve write speeds, a pseudo-SLC cache is used, so bursts of incoming writes are soaked up more quickly. The cache is sized at 491 GB. Copying data out of the SLC cache (folding) completes at 250 MB/s. Thanks to support for the fast PCI-Express 4.0 interface, performance is excellent. The Cardea Z44Q is rated for sequential read speeds of up to 5,000 MB/s and 3,700 MB/s write; random IOPS reach up to 350K for reads and 600K for writes.
At its launch, the SSD was priced at 240 USD. The warranty length is set to five years, which is an excellent warranty period. Teamgroup guarantees an endurance rating of 400 TBW, a relatively low value compared to other SSDs.