The Team Group T-Force Cardea A440 Pro is the second Phison E18+Micron 176-layer SSD we're reviewing. We did have the chance to preview an engineering sample drive from Phison back in May, and just last week we covered the Kingston KC3000. The new Phison E18 and Micron 176-layer TLC NAND combination works extremely well, with fantastic results that confirm Phison is on the right track to becoming a premium SSD controller vendor. If you've read our Phison E18 preview, you might have wondered whether you've seen it before when looking at the photos of the Cardea A440 Pro. That's right, today's SSD looks exactly the same as the Phison reference design. It seems Team Group took the Phison design and used it for their own product. This is certainly a valid approach as Phison probably knows best how to design an SSD that works well with their own controller. In terms of physical design, it's also worth mentioning that a DRAM cache is included for the mapping tables of the SSD, which helps with random writes.

Synthetic performance numbers of the A440 Pro are really good; all results are near at the top of our charts. An important result is that sequential writes are faster than any other SSD we've tested before. Sequential reads are super high, too, 5.57 GB/s, just 30 MB/s behind the top score. Random IO results are excellent as well, higher than the major competitors WD Black SN850 and Samsung 980 Pro, albeit only by a small margin. No doubt a lot of optimization went into getting these scores high enough to beat the other drives. That's why our real-life testing is so important—it runs actual applications, something that's much harder to optimize for. Our real-life testing is also performed with 80% of the drive filled, which is a more realistic scenario and limits the drive in the way it uses its pseudo-SLC cache.

In our real-life test suite, the Team Group T-Force Cardea A440 Pro achieves excellent results, too. It matches the Samsung 980 Pro, and beats the Corsair MP600 Pro by 1%. Only the WD Black SN850 and Kingston KC3000 are 1% faster. It's surprising that Kingston's drive ends up a tiny bit faster than the A440 Pro even though both use the same underlying hardware. I dug a bit deeper and found that the KC3000 (and the Phison E18 Preview SSD) run their flash at 1600 MT/s, whereas Team Group has chosen to run their chips at 1200 MT/s, no idea why. Another difference is that Kingston set the SLC cache size to 645 GB and Team Group uses 200 GB, but achieves higher sustained write speeds with that setting. Compared to the fastest PCI-Express 3.0 drives, the difference is around 2-5%; of course, more depending on the workload. More value-oriented PCIe 3.0 drives are 15% slower, and the aging SATA drives are around 25% slower, SATA QLC even 40–50%.

As mentioned before, the pseudo-SLC cache size of the A440 Pro is 200 GB, which is within the "typical" range by today's standards. While the Kingston KC3000 runs all its cells in SLC mode first and then has to juggle data out of SLC into TLC while handling incoming writes, Team Group's drive has a much bigger margin here, which results in a new record for our "fill whole disk" test. With 2.3 GB/s on average, the A440 Pro can even beat the MLC-based Samsung 970 Pro. The best Gen 4 SSDs are not that far behind, with the WD Black SN850 at 1.6 GB/s, Samsung 980 Pro at 1.9 GB/s, and Kingston KC3000 at 2 GB/s. Of course, momentarily stopping the write activity will have the SLC cache free up capacity immediately, so full write rates are available as soon as you give the drive a moment to settle down.

Team Group includes a large aluminium heatsink you can install if you feel like you want better thermal dissipation capabilities for your A440 Pro. We ran our thermal tests with and without the heatsink installed. The configuration without the heatsink does run into thermal throttling fairly quickly when heavily loaded—after around 300 GB written in 60 seconds. What I don't like is that that the thermal throttling is very aggressive. Performance will basically stop until the drive has cooled down a bit, and then resumes at full speed. Other drives use more gradual throttling algorithms that try to make the performance loss less noticeable. Once we installed the heatsink things were much better, though. Even in our thermal stress test, we couldn't get the drive to throttle anymore. Temperatures improved a lot: 75°C instead of 105°C. While it might sound like you absolutely should install a heatsink on the A440 Pro, that's not really the case. When paired with normal consumer workloads, the drive will very rarely get hot enough to throttle—remember that we wrote 300 GB in 60 seconds. You first have to find a source for that much data in such a short time. Still, it's good to see that Team Group is including a heatsink—something we missed on the Kingston KC3000.

Priced at $360 for the tested 2 TB version, the T-Force Cardea A440 Pro is not a bargain. It's similarly priced as competing high-end M.2 NVMe drives, like the Samsung 980 Pro ($360), WD Black SN850 ($350), and Corsair MP600 Pro ($340). The Kingston KC3000 is MUCH more expensive at $450, definitely not worth it. $350 for a 2 TB SSD is still a lot of money considering you can find good PCIe 3.0 drives for around $100 less; there's the HP EX950 ($250), Hynix Gold P31 ($250), or Kingston KC2500 ($280). If you only care about price/performance and are happy to sacrifice some performance for better pricing, entry-level value M.2 NVMe SSDs could be an option as those retail at around $200 and below and are not that much slower.