The TeamGroup L5 LITE 3D (480GB) SATA SSD Review: Entry-Level Price With Mainstream Performance
by Billy Tallis on September 20, 2019 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- SSDs
- SATA
- Silicon Motion
- SM2258
- TeamGroup
Conclusion
The SATA SSD market is pretty boring these days, and just about the only way for a product to stand out is to be significantly cheaper than the competition. Sometimes we see one of the top brands use the advantages of their vertical integration to price a great product low enough to shut out lots of lesser entry-level drives. It's relatively rare that we see the same tactic pulled off by a smaller fabless OEM. For most of its time on the market, the TeamGroup L5 LITE 3D has been one of the cheapest drives in the North American market. The low pricing alone was reason enough for me to ask Team to send one my way last time they were offering up SSDs for review. The L5 LITE 3D didn't disappoint.
The performance profile of the Team L5 LITE 3D generally fits what we expect from a mainstream SATA SSD rather than an entry-level drive. None of our tests revealed any significant performance loss from the SLC cache filling up, and running our ATSB Heavy and Light tests on a full drive didn't bring it to its knees. The only negative result that really stands out is with random reads, which are both slower and more power-hungry than what we see with competing SATA drives from top-tier brands like Crucial, WD and Samsung. Even then, the difference is most pronounced at higher queue depths that are less likely to be encountered during typical real-world usage.
The Team L5 LITE 3D's power consumption under load is generally a bit high, but not enough to worry about. What is a real problem is that idle power management doesn't work as it should—it idles around 0.5W with or without SATA link power management. It's impossible for us to test whether the deeper DevSleep mode works properly since our testbed is a desktop system, but the intermediate Slumber state should be able to get the drive well under 0.1W.
The Team L5 LITE 3D is a decent choice for a desktop that is overdue for an upgrade to its first SSD, and it's a very affordable way to add a second SSD to a system where the primary SSD is getting full. The power management issues make it a poor choice to go into a laptop, and for an all-new desktop build the primary SSD should probably be a NVMe drive rather than SATA except where the budget is extremely tight. For users with fairly light storage workloads, the low write endurance of the L5 LITE 3D should still be plenty, and it's probably a more sensible tradeoff than the sometimes steep performance penalty of DRAMless SATA SSDs.
While SSD prices were still in freefall, the L5 LITE 3D was leading the charge and occasionally standing out to a degree we haven't seen since the Mushkin Reactor first made 1TB SSDs relatively affordable back in the planar NAND days. Now that SSD prices have leveled out, the Team L5 LITE 3D doesn't stand out as much, but it's still a good deal for a cheap SSD that doesn't really feel cheap.
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eek2121 - Thursday, September 26, 2019 - link
Because anonymous user reviews on the internet are meaningless? I've purchased products with 1% 1-star reviews that were complete turds (last one was a USB drive claiming to be a terabyte. Knew it was fake, but I bought it anyway and returned it so Amazon would damn the seller to hell, which they did).User reviews are meaningless these days.
TheinsanegamerN - Friday, September 20, 2019 - link
Spend the extra $5 and get the Crucial MX line instead, with Power Off Protection and higher NAND and controller quality.Billy Tallis - Friday, September 20, 2019 - link
The MX500 uses literally the same controller, albeit with custom firmware (which is where most of the partial power loss protection comes from).And since apparently today is one of the days that the L5 LITE 3D is on sale (it wasn't yesterday when I checked), the price difference is more than $15 for the 480/500GB drives. The Crucial MX500 is 30% more expensive at the moment.
TheinsanegamerN - Friday, September 20, 2019 - link
And yet, despite using the same controller, that custom firmware makes ALL the difference. Just take a look at team SSD failure rates VS crucials.It doesnt matter if the team drives are $10-15 cheaper. Skip a single meal at your prefered fast food joint of choice and get a drive that is going to actually work properly.
kpb321 - Friday, September 20, 2019 - link
ALL drives can and WILL eventually fail and if you don't have a proper back up you are just gambling that it doesn't happen while you still care about what's on the drive. If you do have a proper backup a drive failure is just a minor inconvenience and proof that your backup process works. I have a 240gb version of this drive installed in my wife's laptop to upgrade her from the 120gb drive that came in it and I'm not worried about it at all. If the drive dies I'll simply restore the nightly backup from the NAS to a new drive and she's back up and running with minimal data loss and downtime. I'd rather spend money on a NAS and a proper back than on a "better" ssd to gamble that the better drive won't fail on me.eastcoast_pete - Friday, September 20, 2019 - link
Partially agree. However, it's not just about the direct cost of a drive. Even if the PC is just used for web browsing and entertainment, I still have to spend time and effort on replacing the drive, installing the OS and software etc. Thus, spending a few dollars more for a more reliable drive might well be worth it.Death666Angel - Friday, September 20, 2019 - link
"spending a few dollars more for a more reliable drive might well be worth it" - the thing is, as many don't seem to understand, that we can't measure reliability in any useful way right now. All data we have is incomplete. Basing any kind of decision on that data means that decision is either good, neutral or bad and no one will know.Samus - Sunday, September 22, 2019 - link
It isn't the controller, it's the quality of the NAND. Crucial uses excellent quality NAND.lightningz71 - Friday, September 20, 2019 - link
This can't possibly be any crummier than the EDGE drives I purchased at work a few years ago. I purchased a batch of twenty 512GB SATA SSDs through Amazon, and EVERY LAST ONE OF THEM failed between 13 and 17 months from the day that they were first installed. Standard desktop usage on PCs that were nowhere near considered write heavy was their environment. Just terrible in every way.Scott_T - Friday, September 20, 2019 - link
With 240gb drives being so cheap I'm surprised anyone would come out with a new 120gb drive these days.