Introduction

Team Group is a well-known Taiwanese hardware manufacturer with a long history of catering to the needs of enthusiasts and gamers from all over the globe. Their lineup includes DRAM memory and solid-state drives, and they also offer various memory cards and USB thumb drives.



Today's review covers the Team Group T-Force Cardea IOPS, which is powered by a Phison PS5012-E12S controller paired with 3D TLC NAND from Toshiba and DRAM from Kingston. PCI-Express 3.0 x4 is used as the host interface. The highlight of the Cardea IOPS is that it can operate in three cooling configurations: no heatsink (the default), a thin graphene heatspreader, or a large metal heatsink—the choice is yours.

The Team Group Cardea IOPS is only available in a 1 TB configuration with an endurance of 1665 TBW. Team Group provides a five-year warranty for the Cardea IOPS.

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.

Test Setup