The Teamgroup Cardea Z44L is a solid-state drive in the M.2 2280 form factor, launched on September 10th, 2021. It is available in capacities ranging from 500 GB to 1 TB. This page reports specifications for the 1 TB variant. With the rest of the system, the Teamgroup Cardea Z44L interfaces using a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 connection. The SSD controller is the PS5019-E19-35 from Phison, a DRAM cache is not available. Teamgroup has installed 176-layer TLC NAND flash on the Cardea Z44L, 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 66 GB, once it is full, writes complete at 1244 MB/s. Copying data out of the SLC cache (folding) completes at 175 MB/s. Thanks to support for the fast PCI-Express 4.0 interface, performance is excellent. The Cardea Z44L is rated for sequential read speeds of up to 3,500 MB/s and 3,000 MB/s write; random IOPS reach up to 263K for reads and 382K for writes.
The SSD's price at launch is unknown. The warranty length is set to five years, which is an excellent warranty period. Teamgroup guarantees an endurance rating of 600 TBW, a typical value for consumer SSDs.