The Team Group T-Force Cardea (240GB) SSD Review: Grace Under Write Pressure
by Billy Tallis on September 28, 2017 8:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer
The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
The Team T-Force Cardea has a better overall data rate on The Destroyer than the SATA drives or the Samsung 960 EVO, but the larger Phison E7 drives and the 256GB MLC-based NVMe drives are much faster.
For both average and 99th percentile latency during The Destroyer, the T-Force Cardea is the slowest Phison E7 SSD. The Phison drives all have decent 99th percentile latency, while most of Samsung's drives have more significant outliers.
The rankings for average read and write latencies are mostly the same, with the T-Force Cardea coming in last among the Phison E7 drives but still scoring much better than the Samsung 960 EVO.
The Phison E7 drives do fairly well at keeping latency outliers under control, though there are major differences between firmware versions. The T-Force Cardea's 99th percentile read latency is much better than the Samsung 960 EVO but also clearly slower than the other Phison E7 drives. On the write side, the T-Force Cardea's 99th percentile write latency is not the slowest among the Phison E7 drives, and all the Phison E7 drives score better than the competition.
The Team T-Force Cardea has good power efficiency on The Destroyer, with lower total energy usage than any other NVMe SSD in this bunch except the discontinued Samsung 950 PRO.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
22 Comments
View All Comments
MajGenRelativity - Thursday, September 28, 2017 - link
Yep. Anandtech doesn't have the money to purchase a lot of their own review samples, so it is up to the company to provide them.DanNeely - Thursday, September 28, 2017 - link
More to the point, they can get enough free (donation/loan) hardware to keep their reviewers all busy; why should they buy out of pocket instead. AFAIK most exceptions fall under the category of the reviewer writing about something they bought for personal use.MajGenRelativity - Thursday, September 28, 2017 - link
That also makes senseFlunk - Thursday, September 28, 2017 - link
MyDigitalSSD is a rebrander, they slap their sticker on drives made by an OEM, quite often ADATA. I've taken a look at the model you mentioned and it looks like a PHISON E7 reference design, as such I can't really guess which OEM made it or the real model name.But if you're thinking of buying one, any review of a PHISON E7 reference design should be relevant.
willis936 - Thursday, September 28, 2017 - link
How can anyone compete against samsung in the consumer SSD space?MajGenRelativity - Thursday, September 28, 2017 - link
64 layer NAND and new controllers should allow other companies to do so. The Intel 545s puts up a stiff fightBrokenCrayons - Thursday, September 28, 2017 - link
That's easy, just sell a lower performance product at a competitive price. Certainly Samsung has some good SSDs out there, but the seat-of-the-pants feel between one of their top performing drives and a budget SSD will be small or, in some cases, not noticed outside of benchmarks since the rest of the system becomes a factor in acutal usage. These other competitors can just knock a few percent off the sales price and a lot of people will happily purchase drive that is slower.davidedney123 - Thursday, September 28, 2017 - link
Seriously, who decides "Yeah I'll trust my data to a Team Group Team T-Force Cardea, as it's tuppence cheaper than a drive from Samsung/Intel/Crucial/Some other proper company?Storage is one area I would really not recommend going for off brand tat to save a few dollars.
Billy Tallis - Thursday, September 28, 2017 - link
It's not like any of the important bits are actually designed or built by TeamGroup. This is a Phison drive wearing a Team heatsink. Phison is hardly "off-brand", though they're certainly not the premium brand. They account for a huge portion of the consumer SSD market.davidedney123 - Friday, September 29, 2017 - link
Phison sell them the controller IC, someone else makes the NAND (and the grade will depend on what they are paying the manufacturer for it), but assembly, validation, final testing, and support are all from Frangpai Magic SSD Friend or whatever they are called. My point still stands.