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 we're taking a look at the Team Group MP44L SSD, which has been available since earlier this year. This value-oriented drive is built using 176-layer 3D TLC NAND flash from Micron, paired with the four-channel Phison E21 controller that we've seen on the Corsair MP600 GS before. Since this is a cost-optimized design, a DRAM cache is not included.

The Team Group MP44L is available in capacities of 250 GB ($29), 500 GB ($30), 1 TB ($43) and 2 TB ($88). Endurance for these models is set to 200 TBW, 300 TBW, 600 TBW and 1200 TBW, respectively. Team Group includes a five-year warranty with the MP44L.

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 4.0 x4 is used as the host interface to the rest of the system, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth compared to PCIe 3.0 x4.


On the PCB you'll find the controller and four flash chips. The other side of the PCB is empty.

Chip Component Analysis

The Phison PS5021-E21 is Phison's newest PCI-Express 4.0 controller. It's a cost-optimized model, with four flash channels and support for TLC and QLC NAND. Phison has designed the E21 for DRAM-less operation, and it supports the NVMe 1.4 protocol. The controller itself is fabricated using a 12 nanometer process at TSMC Taiwan.


The four flash chips are Micron 176-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 256 GB.

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.
• M.2 drives are tested with a fan blowing on them; that is, except for the results investigating uncooled behavior on the thermal testing page.

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 600 GB—partitions are resized to fill all available space on the drive.
• All drives are filled with random data to 80% of their capacity
• Partitions are properly aligned.
• 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.