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.



In today's review, we'll be taking a look at the Team Group T-Force Cardea A440 Pro 2 TB. Their latest SSD release is built around Phison's new E18 controller paired with the newest 176-layer 3D TLC NAND flash from Micron. Also included is 2 GB of DRAM cache. If you've been following my reviews, you'll certainly remember our Phison E18 + 176-Layer NAND Preview from May this year. Seems that we're finally seeing the market release of these drives. Just last week, I reviewed the Kingston KC3000, which uses the same hardware configuration, and I have more reviews in the pipe of drives using the E18 controller.

The Team Group Cardea A440 Pro comes in capacities of 1 TB ($190), 2 TB ($360), and 4 TB ($900). Endurance for these models is set to 700 TBW, 1400 TBW, and 3000 TBW respectively. Team Group includes a five-year warranty with the A440 Pro.

Packaging

The Drive

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


While most other M.2 NVMe SSDs transfer data over the PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface, the T-Force Cardea A440 Pro connects to the host system using a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 interface, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth.


Inside the package, you'll find this aluminium heatsink. It is not preinstalled because laptop users or users who have a motherboard with integrated M.2 heatsink would then have to remove the heatsink, possibly breaking the SSD in the process.


The thermal pad is a little bit too short to cover all components, which is surprising, but not a big deal; what matters is that the controller in the middle is cooled properly.


If we take a closer look, we can see that the heatsink is held in place by these metal clip pins. While this kind of mounting is alright, I'd prefer a system with screws as that's more reliable.


Once installed, the A440 Pro with its heatsink looks mighty good.


On the PCB, you'll find the controller and eight flash chips; two DRAM cache chips are installed, too.

Chip Component Analysis

The Phison PS5018-E18 is Phison's PCI-Express 4.0 controller with eight channels. It is produced on TSMC's 12 nanometer node and uses five Arm Cortex R5 CPU cores. The E18 supports NVMe 1.4, TLC, DDR4 memory, and up to 32 dies.


The eight flash chips are Micron 176-layer 3D TLC NAND B47R. Each chip has a capacity of 256 GB.


Two Hynix DDR4-2666 chips provide 2 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.

Test Setup