Team Group MP44L 1 TB

[W1zzard]

The TeamGroup MP44L is a value-oriented M.2 NVMe SSD that comes at a super attractive price point of just $43 for the 1 TB version. Thanks to its TLC-based design, performance is much better than the various QLC drives out there. Our review confirms that the MP44L can even beat the Samsung 980.

Show full review

 

[kapone32]

The price is attractive but where is the Capacity. I will take a 4TB for under $200. Better yet give me 8 tb for $400. This is my biggest gripe with NVME. That drive as fast as it is will probably be less than 10 modern Games when Games are just getting bigger. I bet that New Star Wars Game will push up to 200 GB on PC. F me anyone who has had Payday 2 for any length of time on Auto Update on Steam also knows how big Games can get. Then there are all the people that make videos. 4K means more storage as well. This is a travesty. It is good for a boot drive though.

 

[Wirko]

The price is attractive but where is the Capacity. I will take a 4TB for under $200. Better yet give me 8 tb for $400. This is my biggest gripe with NVME.

I see many posts here that explain this by greed. But why doesn't the same greed affect 1TB/2TB drive prices equally? And 4TB+ drives dropped in price to less than a half in a year, roughly the same as smaller ones.
There must be a technical explanation, more complex chip packaging or something. And I have no idea why we're seeing so few double-sided M.2 SSDs. As if everything were designed for notebooks exclusively.

 

[nomdeplume]

Timely review given I have an ongoing thread directly related. At first glance....

There is evidence current stock resulting from current production use a Maxio controller instead of the Phison provided to all reviewers. Base specs appear unaltered within acceptable tolerances (firmware) while consumer expectations garnered through reviews are being defaulted upon by the manufacturer. At least within the structure of US regulations this is an unrelenting business practice reliant upon immediate status in the market. Leading to increasingly restless comments, per those above. ↑

As always, thanks to W1zz for the competent review. I personally will be returning back to my research on a synthetically limited product range determined by (I have no shame in saying the words "Open Box") the offerings at a local retailer with lower price points.

 

[The King]

@W1zzard Why is the Kingston NV2 1TB data still on the charts.

 

[AnarchoPrimitiv]

Man, I might pick up the 2TB as just a data drive it's so cheap

 

[L'Eliminateur]

On page 6, there's an error on the text below the SLC cache graph, probably copypasted from another drive:

"Write speed starts out at well over 3.5 GB/s, which is sustained until 592 GB have been written to the drive. This is a big SLC cache, as it covers a majority of the drive's TLC capacity (3x 592 GB = 1776 GB). Once the SLC cache is full, write speeds drop to around 2200 MB/s for a while, and then further drop to around 1000 MB/s, which is still pretty good. Filling the whole capacity completes at 1514 MB/s on average, which is one of the best results in our test group."

But if you look at the graph(and then at the spec below), the drive has only 63GB of SLC, it's only 1TB and it drops to less than 2GB/s

 

[W1zzard]

On page 6, there's an error on the text below the SLC cache graph, probably copypasted from another drive:

But if you look at the graph(and then at the spec below), the drive has only 63GB of SLC, it's only 1TB and it drops to less than 2GB/s

Fixed

@W1zzard Why is the Kingston NV2 1TB data still on the charts.

I think I'll buy another one and see what the controller lottery gives me and include both results in the charts going forward.

 

[Icon Charlie]

I see many posts here that explain this by greed. But why doesn't the same greed affect 1TB/2TB drive prices equally? And 4TB+ drives dropped in price to less than a half in a year, roughly the same as smaller ones.
There must be a technical explanation, more complex chip packaging or something. And I have no idea why we're seeing so few double-sided M.2 SSDs. As if everything were designed for notebooks exclusively.

You forget that a lot of pricing is dictated by those that do marketing assessments into the sectors of product they govern. If there is a demand in a product sector of something the price will go up regardless of similar products.

Yea, seen a lot of this first hand in dealing with the bobble heads, who are in the end nothing more than annoying Air Thieves that need their copeium taken away from them

 

[QUANTUMPHYSICS]

2TB at $88 is the real story.
If I was going to buy one right now, I'd get the 2TB.
Thing is, For double that price I can get 4TB.

I personally like having my OS and the cloud services on the same drive so my storage needs are no less than 4TB for the main system storage and 2TB drives for added storage.

 

[Anymal]

as long its working, SSDs are all good enough for home use

 

[Arcdar]

sadly currently unavailable on amazon at the moment. Wizz made them sell out

@W1zzard thanks, as always, for a very good and extensive review, right when I was about to get a new system disk around 1TB which needs to be fast enough but not "record breaking". I'll definitely get one of those if they are available below 50€ again

 

[mechtech]

TLC nice
Controller nice
warranty nice
price nice
Review great

lack of dram - so so

Lack of 4TB, 6TB and 8TB drives at a linear scaling price of the 1-2TB models.........BOOOOOOOOOOOOO

 

[chrcoluk]

SATA feels like its almost abandoned now even in the budget segment.

I am guessing w1zzard new kit being offered to you is dead in that area.

--

Price seems really good value though and I cant help but feel bait and switch to QLC for this is inevitable. I guess a buy early to lower the risk?

 

[kapone32]

SATA feels like its almost abandoned now even in the budget segment.

I am guessing w1zzard new kit being offered to you is dead in that area.

--

Price seems really good value though and I cant help but feel bait and switch to QLC for this is inevitable. I guess a buy early to lower the risk?

That is actually a sad point. One of the things that is overlooked about SSDs is that they don't suffer from the Cliff the NVME suffers from. In A RAID 0 array especially you will see that in some cases that an SSD RAID 0 array can be faster than NVME in some instances.

 

[chrcoluk]

I think the WD SA510 is still TLC, some retailers have it TLC on the sales page so could get refunded if turned out to be QLC. However 2TB and up the price per gig skyrockets. Quite possibly the only SATA drive that is safe to buy. mx500, bx500 QLC (and both my mx500s had nasty issues), 870 evo unacknowledged issues so on blacklist.

 

[W1zzard]

SATA feels like its almost abandoned now even in the budget segment.

I am guessing w1zzard new kit being offered to you is dead in that area.

Yeah, very little SATA action. I do have a 870 EVO 4 TB coming that I bought myself, will review. I need more space for all those games and would love to find a SATA drive that can absorb a few hundreds of GB incoming writes without slowdown.

 

[Selaya]

yeah, sata is basically regressing at this point; basically all new releases are targeted at the bottom-of-the-barrel segment w/ their dramless qlc garbage
and dramless is no good for sata; it just needs the dram to perform adequately (also no qlc but yea)

 

[Anymal]

Yeah, very little SATA action. I do have a 870 EVO 4 TB coming that I bought myself, will review. I need more space for all those games and would love to find a SATA drive that can absorb a few hundreds of GB incoming writes without slowdown.

208 eur... but worth it, 4Tb HDD in my PC is annoyingly loud.

 

[chrcoluk]

yeah, sata is basically regressing at this point; basically all new releases are targeted at the bottom-of-the-barrel segment w/ their dramless qlc garbage
and dramless is no good for sata; it just needs the dram to perform adequately (also no qlc but yea)

If I am right SATA cant use the hosts RAM as replacement right? That HMB feature NVME only.

 

[mechtech]

yeah, sata is basically regressing at this point; basically all new releases are targeted at the bottom-of-the-barrel segment w/ their dramless qlc garbage
and dramless is no good for sata; it just needs the dram to perform adequately (also no qlc but yea)

The one thing sata has going for it is most mobos have 6 ports. Once mobos have 6 nvme slots that will probably be the final nail in the coffin.

 

[ShogoXT]

Don't forget about the 2tb version folks. That's where they always swap out the parts. I hardly ever see those e21t SSDs sold as advertised past 2tb.

Mine was a Map1602a plus YMTC 128l tlc NAND. I returned it for a higher end model deal.

I tried to report it to the SSD database too.

 

[L'Eliminateur]

If I am right SATA cant use the hosts RAM as replacement right? That HMB feature NVME only.

indeed, HMB is a nvme feature, it makes no sense for SATA as the interface is the bottleneck and it also could not be implemented (HMB does not need a driver/application in theory as it's drive firmware managed via DMA and part of the specification)

Yeah, very little SATA action. I do have a 870 EVO 4 TB coming that I bought myself, will review. I need more space for all those games and would love to find a SATA drive that can absorb a few hundreds of GB incoming writes without slowdown.

Well it makes no real economic sense to develop "high performance" drives for a legacy "dead" interface that can be maxed out by the cheapest slowest nand and controller combo.

¿what's left in SATA?, you have Crucial MX500 which was introduced in 2018 (last FW 2014 and it uses a hodgepodge of different NAND types), 870 EVO which is TLC from 2021, and 870 QVO QLC which is trash (unless you find it at bargain basement prices and use it for all reads/seq writes) and several kingston drives like the A400 ultra cheap/KC600 and their SATA datacenter drives(which could be a good drive if found at bargain) like the DC500R/M or DC600M

 

[chrcoluk]

indeed, HMB is a nvme feature, it makes no sense for SATA as the interface is the bottleneck and it also could not be implemented (HMB does not need a driver/application in theory as it's drive firmware managed via DMA and part of the specification)


Well it makes no real economic sense to develop "high performance" drives for a legacy "dead" interface that can be maxed out by the cheapest slowest nand and controller combo.

¿what's left in SATA?, you have Crucial MX500 which was introduced in 2018 (last FW 2014 and it uses a hodgepodge of different NAND types), 870 EVO which is TLC from 2021, and 870 QVO QLC which is trash (unless you find it at bargain basement prices and use it for all reads/seq writes) and several kingston drives like the A400 ultra cheap/KC600 and their SATA datacenter drives(which could be a good drive if found at bargain) like the DC500R/M or DC600M

Well to me the main benefit of HMB is not throughput but rather longevity of the static nand blocks that cannot be wear levelled, a ram cache prevents them been written anywhere near as often. So the risk on dramless SATA for me is much higher than NVME which has HMB as a substitute.

In terms of econcomic sense, you are looking at it from a marketing point of view, currently NVME has the marketing benefits as they want to keep advertising ever faster drives. However M.2 has limitations with its form factor and the fact it needs more motherboard PCB space, from a practical point of view 600MB/sec is absolutely fine from a performance perspective for the vast majority of consumer workloads. So the real bottleneck in the SSD industry right now isnt speed, its capacity. Currently I have a bunch of half or 1tb SSD's (plus my enterprise 2TB dc p4600) and there is no way my next SSD is anything smaller than 2TB but ideally at least 4TB. I also cannot retire my remaining spindles in my PC until 4-8TB SSDs become mainstream. Posts are gradually becoming more common on here for instance regarding wanting bigger drives. I am currently considering a 2TB SN850 as I have noticed prices have come down somewhat, but SATA does have the capability for larger capacity drives, it just needs vendor interest.

My DC P4600 is also actually slower than my SATA 860 EVO for practical purposes, it has poor single threaded performance, and its 4k is notably lower. Slower at chkdsk etc. It only wins on sequential which isnt that important above about 200-300MB/sec. However its 2TB size and massive endurance rating I am using it quite a lot for heavy write stuff now.

As w1zzard said TLC SATA drives at least can maintain their speeds 100% as well, he gave you a use case, and I look forward to his review.

I think I will likely lean to a WD blue as next SATA SSD though.