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 testing the Team Group Z540, which is the company's new PCI-Express Gen 5 flagship drive, reaching speeds of up to 12 GB/s.
Just like drives from other vendors, the Z540 is sold as just the drive, without any heatsink. In the coming weeks, Team Group will offer a bundle of both the SSD and their Team Group AirFlow SSD cooler. This is an interesting bundle, because the cooler looks pretty impressive, which means it should achieve good temperatures without going overboard in terms of noise—unlike some other Gen 5 SSDs we've reviewed.
The Z540 utilizes the blazing fast PCI-Express 5.0 interface, which doubles the potential transfer rates over PCIe Gen 4. Internally, Team Group is using the Phison E26 controller, that also powers all the other currently available Gen 5 SSDs. Other vendors such as Samsung, WD, Kioxia, Silicon Motion and Innogrit are working on their own designs, but have nothing to show yet. For NAND flash the Z540 is using Micron's newest B58R 3D TLC NAND with 232-layers. As expected for a high-end drive, a DRAM cache chip is included. Compared to the Corsair MP700, our first Gen 5 SSD review, the Team Group comes with newer firmware (just like the SSTC Tiger Shark Elite) and support for 12 GB/s.

The Team Group Z540 with AirFlow bundle will be available in capacities of 1 TB ($200) and 2 TB ($300). The Z540 without cooler costs $150 / $260 at the moment. Endurance for these models is set to 700 TBW and 1400 TBW, respectively. Team Group includes a three-year warranty with the Z540 SSD.

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


On the PCB you'll find the controller and four flash chips, a single DRAM cache chip is included, too.


Team Group's little M.2 cooler looks pretty awesome, almost like a Steampunk train.


On the bottom you get two heatpipes that move heat away quickly to a bunch of fins, where it is dissipated in the fan's airflow.


A standard 4-pin fan header is used, not the clumsy SATA power connector that we saw on other Gen 5 SSDs. This also means that you can easily control the fan speed through your motherboard.


Included with the cooler are two thermal pads, so you have a spare, just in case.


Also included is a thin metal heat spreader sticker, which could be useful in situations where you can't fit the full M.2 cooler.

Chip Component Analysis

The Phison PS5026-E26 is Phison's first PCI-Express 5.0 controller. It is the company's current flagship with support for eight flash channels and NVMe 2.0, using an Arm Cortex design. The controller itself is fabricated using a 12 nanometer process at TSMC Taiwan.


The four flash chips are Micron 232-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 512 GB.


One Hynix DDR4-4266 chip provides a total of 4 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.

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.