The Teamgroup Cardea A440 is a solid-state drive in the M.2 2280 form factor, launched in 2021. It is available in capacities ranging from 1 TB to 2 TB. This page reports specifications for the 1 TB variant. With the rest of the system, the Teamgroup Cardea A440 interfaces using a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 connection. The SSD controller is the PS5018-E18-41 from Phison, a DRAM cache chip is available. Teamgroup has installed 96-layer TLC NAND flash on the Cardea A440, the flash chips are made by Micron. To improve write speeds, a pseudo-SLC cache is used, so bursts of incoming writes are absorbed more quickly. The cache is sized at 112 GB, once it is full, writes complete at 1124 MB/s. Copying data out of the SLC cache (folding) completes at 700 MB/s. Thanks to support for the fast PCI-Express 4.0 interface, performance is excellent. The Cardea A440 is rated for sequential read speeds of up to 7,000 MB/s and 5,500 MB/s write; random IO reaches 700K IOPS for read and 650K for writes.
At its launch, the SSD was priced at 157 USD. The warranty length is set to five years, which is an excellent warranty period. Teamgroup guarantees an endurance rating of 700 TBW, a typical value for consumer SSDs.