Team Group's T-Force M200 is a great-looking, portable SSD that wants to be a bit bigger and bolder with its rugged, edgy looks. Under the hood, we found a full-size M.2 NVMe SSD, which seems to be the reason for the physical size. Competing drives like the Kingston XS2000 are much smaller because they use a specialized PCB design produced just for the external SSD. Team Group's approach does give them the ability to use leftover full-size M.2 NVMe drives in their inventory to build the M200.

Performance numbers of the T-Force M200 are impressive since it's the fastest portable SSD we ever tested by quite a big margin. Thanks to the fast USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 20 Gbps interface, the 1 GB/s bottleneck of most external SSDs is no longer a problem. In terms of sequential speeds, the drive runs at around 1.5 GB/s at even low queue depths, which is important if you copy just a single file at a time—the most common usage scenario for a portable SSD. Another important data point is that sequential mixed—write a file and read another file at the same time—completes at 1.2 GB/s, which is much faster than all the non-USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 drives we have in our test group. Random IO is not that important for a portable SSD unless you want to run programs or games from it; for example, when using the SSD to expand storage on game consoles. For that use case, performance is very good, too. Thanks to the inclusion of a DRAM cache chip, random write performance is excellent, too.

Due to the use of QLC NAND flash, sustained write speeds of the Team Group T-Force M200 are not good. Filling the whole 2 TB capacity completes with 133 MB/s on average. That's mechanical hard-drive speeds. So if you want to copy a lot of data in one go, you should look elsewhere. The pseudo-SLC cache is very large with 465 GB on the tested 2 TB version, so it can soak up even large bursts of write activity with ease—these will complete at over 1.6 GB/s. Once that cache is exhausted performance drops off a cliff and you're down to HDD speeds. If your working sets are smaller, or you have pauses in transfers that give the drive room to breathe, you'll never encounter those limitations, though.

Thanks to a mix of metal and plastic, the physical construction of the T-Force M200 is good. I like that the surface structure is not completely smooth. The increased weight of the metal also gives the M200 a bit more "meat" when you hold it in your hands. While Team Group advertises a "2 m drop" capability, that really means "2 m onto carpet, damage might happen," which is not that impressive. Looking at the physical construction of the M200, I see no reason why it wouldn't survive everything you can throw at it, so Team Group could just be playing it safe. However, what is lacking is any sort of IP protection rating. With even a most basic rubber seal, some splash resistance could have been achieved, adding only cents to the production cost. Unlike some competing drives, you do get an activity indicator LED, which is great for a quick glance to find out whether an operation has completed yet.

Priced at $310 for the tested 2 TB version, the T-Force M200 is priced a little bit too high considering it's a 2 TB QLC SSD. On the other hand, if you look at our price/performance charts, the T-Force M200 is a clear winner. Team Group's Cardea Z44Q, which the M200 is based on, currently sells for around $240, so $70 for the USB PCB and outer shell seems a bit high, but not crazy. The strongest competitor is the Kingston XS2000, which is priced aggressively at $280 and based on TLC, not QLC. Based on a single-controller solution handling both the SSD storage and USB interface, it can also be more compact. To enjoy the blazing speeds of the T-Force M200, your computer has to support the USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 20 Gbps interface or the SSD will operate at 10 Gbps or even less. For AMD AM4, only seven motherboards exist with 20 Gbps USB, so you'll probably have to use a PCIe add-in card. For Intel, the selection is decent, but requires the LGA1200 or LGA1700 platform. You can also pair these super-fast USB SSDs with the new consoles, but neither PS5 nor Xbox Series X have support for 20 Gbps USB, so your gains will be limited.