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
While this drive doesn't seem too interesting, I'm very interested in your upcoming review on M.2 Thermal Throttling!Pinn - Thursday, September 28, 2017 - link
You should see it by using ~10G files and a ram drive. The Intel card SSD is much more consistent than the M.2 sticks I've tried.Dr. Swag - Thursday, September 28, 2017 - link
Did you guys change some things? Because it feels like some of the results are different, as I remember the 960 evo doing a lot better before...evilspoons - Thursday, September 28, 2017 - link
These results only include the 250 GB 960 Evo, which is the bottom of the line for the 960 series. IIRC the controller is kneecapped due to having a minimum number of NAND chips available and has no parallel processing ability... hence why reviews like this are interesting!Billy Tallis - Thursday, September 28, 2017 - link
Yep. Our initial review of the 960 EVO only included results from the 1TB model, because our first 250GB sample died during testing. The replacement has been working fine, but its performance profile is very different from the 1TB.The relationship between performance and capacity was the biggest reason I wanted to review this drive; it was the first 240GB Phison E7 sample offered to us.
mapesdhs - Thursday, September 28, 2017 - link
It's shocking how much better than 950 Pro is over the 960 EVO a lot of the time. Other reviews show the EVO has issues with steady state performance even at higher capacities. It's why I bagged a lightly used 950 Pro 512GB recently; noticed someone else no doubt delighted at getting another for 130 UKP BIN. :D And of course, the 950 Pro has its own boot ROM (why the heck did Samsung ditch that? Such a useful feature for older chipsets).CheapSushi - Sunday, October 1, 2017 - link
There's an inherent performance and latency difference between MLC (Pro) and TLC (EVO) NAND. Even with updates, better controllers, etc, it is always there (2 bits per cell vs 3 bits per cell).Dr. Swag - Thursday, September 28, 2017 - link
Ah I see. Interesting to see such a large performance gap, though I guess it makes sense.Gasaraki88 - Thursday, September 28, 2017 - link
I wonder why you guys never reviewed the MyDigitalSSD BPX. It's one of the fastest Phison E7 controller SSDs and the cheapest.DanNeely - Thursday, September 28, 2017 - link
MyDigitalSSD would have to send one in for review...