Packaging

The Drive

The drive uses the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


Like most M.2 NVMe SSDs, the Team Group Cardea IOPS connects to the host system over a PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface.


On the PCB, you'll find the controller, four flash chips, and one DRAM chip.


Included in the package is this heatspreader which Team Group calls "Graphene." It is definitely not Graphene because it's not electrically conductive. It just looks like black paint to me—the actual cooling, or rather heat spreading, is done by the thin copper foil pictured below.


One side has sticky glue, which makes it easy to install the heatspreader.


If you want even better cooling performance, a large metal heatsink is included, too. It uses sticky tape and a clip mechanism to attach the heatsink to the SSD.

Chip Component Analysis

The flash controller is made by Phison and supports 3D TLC, QLC, and PCI-Express 3.0 x4. It uses eight flash channels and is produced on a 28 nm process at TSMC Taiwan.


The four flash chips are Toshiba 96-layer 3D TLC NAND.


A single Kingston DDR3 chip provides 256 MB of DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables. This is a surprisingly small amount of DRAM for a 1 TB SSD; normally, you'd expect 1 GB per 1 TB.