Packaging

The Drive

The drive is designed for the highly compact M.2 2230 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and only 30 mm long.


Here's the MP44S compared to a regular-sized M.2 2280 drive—look how tiny it is!


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 SSD controller and one flash chip. A DRAM cache is not available.


Team Group has installed a foil with metal core on their drive. There's also mentions of "Graphene," which I've been highly critical of in the past. Team Group has recently shared some information with me that clarifies on this. Those documents provide good support for their claims that the sticker is a composite material containing graphene. There's several layers, including glue, paint, plastic, aluminium and a thin layer of graphene. I've previously reviewed the Addlink S91, which is the exact same drive, just in a 2 TB configuration and with a classic graphene-free sticker. The Addlink S91 actually has nearly identical thermal performance than the MP44S, so there is no significant temperature effect. The white sticker that's sitting between Team Group sticker and the heat source probably doesn't help.

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.


There's just one flash chip, a Micron 176-layer 3D QLC NAND, with a capacity of 2 TB.