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 - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The Team T-Force Cardea is roughly tied with the Samsung 960 EVO for average data rate on the Heavy test. The T-Force Cardea is slower than the larger Phison E7 SSDs, but the Patriot Hellfire's performance when full is the same as the T-Force Cardea's.
The Patriot Hellfire's latency is quite poor when it's full, but otherwise the larger Phison E7 drives have much lower average and 99th percentile latency than the T-Force Cardea. The Samsung 960 EVO performs worse on both metrics, while the OCZ RD400 and Samsung 950 PRO are at the top of the charts.
Splitting the average latency by reads and writes, we see that the Samsung 960 EVO's problem is mostly on the write side, where the T-Force Cardea beats it easily. The Patriot Hellfire's latency issues when full are worse for writes than for reads.
The Phison E7 drives had good overall 99th percentile latency scores, so its not surprising to see them do well when looking at reads and writes individually. The T-Force Cardea's 99th percentile read latency is worse than the larger Phison E7 drives but half that of the Samsung 960 EVO. For writes, the T-Force Cardea and the 960 EVO are tied when the test is run on a full drive, but the T-Force Cardea's 99th percentile write latency is half that of the 960 EVO when the test is run on an empty drive.
The Phison E7 drives all show poor energy efficiency on the Heavy test, though the T-Force Cardea is the least power-hungry among them.
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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.