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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jabber - Saturday, September 21, 2019 - link
Always be wary of 1 Star tech reviews on Amazon. 60% of them are usually disgruntled "Doesn't work on Mac!" reviews.flyingpants265 - Saturday, September 21, 2019 - link
"They're a biased sample, as very happy and very unhappy people tend to self-report the most. Which doesn't mean what you state is untrue, but it's not something we can corroborate."Ryan, that doesn't explain why one model/brand can have 27% 1-star reviews, and another has 7%.... Unless you think Team Group customers are SEVERAL TIMES MORE outspoken than Crucial/Samsung/whatever customers for some reason. You can't ignore those reports. Ofc the product doesn't have a 27% failure rate, but it's likely much higher than competing products.
Korguz - Saturday, September 21, 2019 - link
ever consider that maybe the bad reviews are either fake, or made up reviews with the person not actually owning, or even bought the product ?flyingpants265 - Monday, September 23, 2019 - link
...Then you'd have to explain why ONLY TEAM GROUP SSDs have tons of fake 1-star reviews, and other SSDs don't. Seems Anandtech commenters are not that bright..Korguz - Sunday, September 29, 2019 - link
maybe one person who bought one, it failed, then to try yo get even, created more then one account ? unless you can PROVE these supposed 1 star reviews are real reviews, then i guess you are not that bright as well... cant really prove your point, so you resort to insults.. grow upKraszmyl - Friday, September 20, 2019 - link
I have nearly a thousand of thier drives from 128g to 480g and so far no failures. Also yes cheap products have poor support, that's one of the reasons why they are cheaper.Samus - Saturday, September 21, 2019 - link
I'd err on the side of caution when dealing with Team Group, though. Failed memory (which I've seen plenty of over the years) is one thing, but failed data storage is a lot more catastrophic. I can't believe I'm saying this but I'd feel safer with an ADATA SSD than a Team Group SSD...and I've seen a number of ADATA's fail, though none recently (in the last few years)bananaforscale - Saturday, September 21, 2019 - link
It's your responsibility to make backups. Never allow a single point of failure.philehidiot - Saturday, September 21, 2019 - link
Aye, especially with SSDs where data recovery is harder than with a HDD. Personally, I pop critical data on two local SSDs and then a memory stick, phone or other system. I don't like the cloud as it is at the mercy of the Internet or another company and I've had access issues which have denied me access to data or, weirdly, only given me access to months old versions. So I prefer a dual local backup, so if a drive fails I can just switch to the backup immediately, and also another copy which is not linked to the same system in case of some catastrophic PSU weirdness that takes out other components (happened once a long time ago and with a cheap PSU) or malware attacks. If I was getting a cheap SSD with a reduced warranty, knowing it uses whatever NAND is cheap at the time, I'd not be using that in a critical system without adequate redundancy (RAID, most likely). You pays your money and takes your choice but if you buy cheap, ensure you're protected... And if you buy expensive.... Ditto.evernessince - Saturday, September 21, 2019 - link
Technically speaking the failure rates should be no higher then other manufacturers, after all they are using the same NAND and controllers as everyone else. That said there is something to be said for poor customer service. I don't know how they are getting that many 1 star reviews though, not unless they are just rebranding B stock.Also, you shouldn't trust only one source for reviews and you should always look at who is posting the bad reviews. For example, this guy seems to be the exact same guy who posted on Newegg as well
https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AF...
He seems to leave a lot of bad reviews and often times does not do a good job explaining why. Judging by their English usage, I'd also say they are not a native speaker. There are plenty of companies in China they also pay people to go out and write both good and bad reviews for competing products which makes research on reviewers all the more important.
I'm not saying they don't deserve their rating, I'm just saying you should always check not just the reviews but the reviewers as well. 2 sources minimum as well. It's a PITA but there are so many fake reviews out there (especially on Amazon) that it's required if you want to get what you paid for.