Teamgroup T-Force Cardea Zero Z440 1TB SSD Review (PCIe Gen 4)

Teamgroup produces its own brand of memory modules, memory cards, USB flash drives, solid-state drives, peripheral's mobile accessories and industrial applications. The companies T-Force product line covers their high-performance and gaming products. The current (at the time of writing) flagship SSD of the T-Force line-up is the Cardea Zero Z440 SSD, a drive that uses the latest PCIe Gen4 x4 interface.

Officially the drive is rated as up to 5,000 MB/s and 4,400MB/s for Sequential read and write respectively. When tested with the ATTO 3.5 benchmark, the review drive kicked sand in the face of that official read figure, producing a figure of 5,581MB/s, making it the fastest 1TB class consumer drive we've seen to date in terms of Sequential reads.

However, when it came to the Sequential write performance, we couldn't quite match that official figure, the drive producing a figure of 4,227MB/s. We got a little closer with our own test at 4,311.24MB/s. Although not matching the official maximum write speed, that ATTO 3.5 write figure is still the third-best write speed we've seen for a consumer 1TB SSD.

4K random performance is quoted as up to 750,000 IOPS for both reads and writes. With our 4-threaded 4K random testing we couldn't get close to that figure, the best read/write figures we saw were 364,231 IOPS and 193,520 IOPS respectively. The closest we saw to the quoted maximum was in the Peak Performance profile test of Crystal Disk Mark 7 where the drive produced a read figure of 636,076 IOPS with writes at 564,451 IOPS (QD32 16 Threads).

Teamgroup forgoes the large heatsink of other Gen4 SSD's with the T-Force Cardea Zero Z440. Instead there is, what looks like a first glance, a normal label covering the controller and NAND, but in fact, the label is a bit special. It uses a patented graphene copper foil ultra-thin (less than 0.2mm thick) material to help keep the drive cool.

According to Teamgroup's own figures, it drops the temperature from 61.8°C to 56.5°C when compared to the lack of any heat sink when actively reading and writing. Using a thin label like this also means that the drive can easily be used in conjunction with any integrated M.2 cooling solution on an X570 motherboard without the faffing around of removing the drive's heatsink.

We found the 1TB Teamgroup T-Force Cardea Zero Z440 for £239.99 (inc VAT) on Overclockers UK HERE.

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Pros.

• Sequential performance.
• PCIe Gen4 x4 SSD.
• Does away with any bulky heatsink.

Cons.

• Needs a X570/Ryzen 3000 combination to get the full benefit of the technology.
• Tested 4K performance couldn’t match the official maximum figures.

Kitguru says: They may be a new name to some but Teamgroup have made their presence felt in the high-performance SSD market by being one of only a very few select manufacturers that have, in the form of the T-Force Cardea Zero Z440, a PCIe Gen 4 SSD sitting in the marketplace

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