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

AnandTech 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.