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 Team Group also offer various memory cards and USB thumb drives.



With the GC Pro, Team Group is introducing their second PCI-Express 5.0 solid-state-drive based on the Innogrit IG5666 controller. The first drive was the "GE Pro", today's review covers the "GC Pro". At first glance, both drives look identical, using the same controller, NAND flash and PCB layout. Unlike the GE Pro, there is no 1 TB model, which makes sense of course, and the GC Pro includes the thin Graphene heat spreader foil that we've seen from Team Group before. Digging a little bit deeper, I found out that the GC Pro clocks its controller at 500 MHz, whereas the GE Pro runs it a bit higher, at 850 MHz. In terms of NAND flash, you're getting YMTC's 232-layer 3D TLC NAND, and the two DRAM cache chips are made by Micron.

The Team Group GC Pro is available in capacities of 2 TB ($200) and 4 TB ($380). The endurance is set to 1200 TBW and 2400 TBW respectively. Team Group includes a five-year warranty with the GC Pro SSD.

Packaging

The Drive

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


PCI-Express 5.0 x4 is used as the host interface to the rest of the system, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth compared to PCIe 4.0 x4.


On the PCB you'll find the controller and four flash chips, two DRAM cache chips are included, too.


Inside the box, Team Group has included a thin heat spreader foil. It has a copper core, which helps move heat around, but its mass is low, so it can't absorb a lot of heat. Our thermal testing shows that this is much too weak and that you need serious cooling for the GC Pro.

Chip Component Analysis

The Innogrit IG5666 is the company's first client-focused PCI-Express Gen 5 controller. It comes with support for eight channels and is produced using a 12 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. Internally, the controller has eight Arm Cortex-R5 cores with NVMe 2.0 support.


The four flash chips are YMTC 232-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 512 GB.


Two Hynix DDR4-3200 chips provide a total of 2 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.

Test Setup

Synthetic Testing

• Tests are run with a 20-second-long warm-up time (result recording starts at second 21).
• Between each test, the drive is left idle for 60 seconds, to allow it to flush and reorganize its internal data.
• All write requests contain random, incompressible data.
• Disk cache is flushed between all tests.
• During these tests, M.2 drives are tested with additional active fan-cooling, to ensure thermal throttling can't happen

Real-life Testing

• After initial configuration and installation, a disk image is created; it is used to test every drive.
• Automated updates are disabled for the OS and all programs. This ensures that—for every review—each drive uses the same settings, without interference from previous testing.
• Our disk image consumes around 700 GB—partitions are resized to fill all available space on the drive.
• All drives are filled with random data to 85% of their capacity. This is intentional, to run the drive in realistic operating conditions—nobody uses a nearly-empty SSD in their system. It also puts additional stress on the pseudo-SLC cache subsystem, because there is less free NAND space to work with.
• Partitions are aligned properly.
• Disk cache is flushed between all tests.
• In order to minimize random variation, each real-life performance test is run several times, with reboots between tests to minimize the impact of disk cache.
• All application benchmarks run the actual application and do not replay any disk traces.
• Our real-life testing data includes performance numbers for a typical high-performance HDD, using results from a Western Digital WD Black 1 TB 7200 RPM 3.5" SATA. HDDs are significantly slower than SSDs, which is why we're not putting the result in the chart, as that would break the scaling, making the SSDs indistinguishable in comparison. Instead, we've added the HDD performance numbers in the title of each test entry.
• During these tests, M.2 drives are tested with additional active fan-cooling, to ensure thermal throttling can't happen