The Team Group T-Force Cardea (240GB) SSD Review: Grace Under Write Pressure

AnandTech 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.