TeamGroup CARDEA Ceramic C440 M.2 SSD Review

When planning out your build there are two main things that you usually consider, performance and build aesthetics. For those looking to do a white-themed build a lot of the time, you have to sacrifice some performance due to the lack white hardware available. Well with TeamGroup’s new Cardea Ceramic White M.2 NVMe SSD you can have the best of both worlds. The Cardea Ceramic sports exception read/write performance with 3,000/2,600 MB/s running on PCIe Gen3 and 5,000/4,400 MB/s on PCIe Gen4 while staying cool with its white ceramic heatsink. It also sports 750K IOPS read/write, is available in 1TB/2TB configurations, and is back with a 5-year warranty. You can find the 1TB version of the Cardea Ceramic C440 available on NewEgg for $184.99. We would like to thank TeamGroup for sending us the 1TB Cardea Ceramic White C440 to review. About TeamGroup Team Group Inc. was founded in 1997 in Taiwan and is one of the leading memory storage manufacturers in the world. They provide a variety of products such as Memory, Solid State Drives, SD Cards, USB drives, and mobile accessories. With their professional research and development teams, it allows them to produce high-quality and innovative products. TeamGroup is also well praised by the industry and customers by adhering to the corporate philosophy of “Integrity, Innovation, Professionalism, Efficiency, Discipline, and Simplicity.” Features Specifications: Model Cardea Ceramic C440 Interface PCIe Gen3 x4 with NVMe 1.3 Capacity 1TB / 2TB Voltage DC +3.3V Operation Temperature 0˚C ~ 70˚C Storage Temperature -40˚C ~ 85˚C Terabyte Written 1TB /1800TBW 2TB/ 3600TB Performance Crystal Disk Mark: IOPS: 1TB Read/Write: up to 5,000/4,400 MB/s 1TB Read/Write: 750K/750K IOPS Max 2TB Read/Write: up to 5,000/4,400 MB/s 2TB Read/Write: 750K/750K IOPS Max Weight 13.5g Dimensions 80.0(L) x 22.0(W) x 4.75(H) mm Humidity RH 90% under 40°C (operational) Vibration 80Hz~2,000Hz/20G Shock 1,500G/0.5ms MTBF 1,700,000 Hours Operating System System Requirements: Windows 10 / 8.1 / 8 / 7 / Vista Linux 2.6.33 or later Warranty 5-year limited warranty A Closer Look TeamGroup’s Cardea Ceramic C440 is packaged in an all-white cardboard exterior that holds a plastic blister pack that secures the Cardea C440. Taking a look at the package we can see the Cardea features support for PCIe Gen4 x4, Ceramic heat sink technology, and that our review sample is the 1TB version. Flipping over to the back, we see that the Cardea features read/write speeds of 5,000/4,400 MB/s while running on PCIe Gen4 and is backed by a 5-year warranty. Now that the Cardea is removed from the blister pack, we can get a closer look at the heat sink which has an all-white exterior with gold writing and T-Force branding. If I had to make a few changes to the aesthetic it would be to go with silver writing and a black PCB. This would give the drive a little more of a neutral color palette and match better with a white build that does not have gold accents. Looking underneath the ceramic heat sink we can also see a white thermal pad to aid in heat dissipation. Flipping the drive to the back we find the always so common warranty sticker along with model information and the serial number of the drive. System Configuration & Testing To test CARDEA CERAMIC White we placed it on our open-air teat bench with the following specifications: CPU: i9 9900K Motherboard: Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Pro RAM: 2 x 8GB Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB @ 3200MHz GPU: Gigabyte RTX 2070 Super Gaming OC OS Drive: Crucial P1 1000GB OS: Window 10 Professional X64 Before I start benchmark the Cardea Ceramic C440, I use CrystalDiskInfo to check out some details of the drive. We can see the Cardea Ceramic supports both PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 4.0 while using the NVM Express 1.3 standard. Since we will be running the Cardea on the Z390 platform it will be running in the PCIe 3.0 mode for these benchmarks. I will be running the drive through various benchmarking applications to see how it fairs under different workloads. These applications include: ATTO Disk Benchmark CrystalDiskMark 6.0 Anvil’s Storage Utilities AS SSD ATTO Disk Benchmark “As the industry's leading provider of high-performance storage & network connectivity products, ATTO has created a widely accepted Disk Benchmark freeware utility to help measure storage system performance. As one of the top tools utilized in the industry, Disk Benchmark identifies performance in hard drives, solid-state drives, RAID arrays as well as connections to storage. Top drive manufacturers, like Hitachi, build and test every drive using the ATTO Disk Benchmark" Running the CARDEA CERAMIC through the ATTO benchmark we see a great write performance of 3,030 MB/s and read performance of 3120 MB/s. This exceeds the drive specified speeds by 430MB/s write and 120MB/s read which was quite unexpected. CrystalDiskMark 6.0 “CrystalDiskMark is designed to quickly test the performance of your hard drives. Currently, the program allows measuring sequential and random read/write speeds." In CrystalDiskMark benchmark pretty much mirrored what we had seen in the ATTO with the Cardea easily pulling past its rated 3,000 read and 2,400 write speed. Anvil's Storage Utilities Anvil’s Storage Utilities has been designed to be the most comprehensive benchmark tool for Solid State Drives on the market. That does not mean that you can’t use it for conventional platter-based drives as well, but you do get the most out of the program when you test the speed and performance of SSDs with it. In Anvil we see the sequential read speed lower than the previous two benchmarks which are expected with this benchmark. Even with this it still managed to hit its rated write speed with 2426 MB/s and is only 378 MB/s below is rated read speed with a posted score of 2,622 MB/s. AS SSD “The AS SSD benchmark determines the performance of Solid State Drives (SSD). The tool contains six synthetic and three copy tests. The synthetic tests determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD. These tests are carried out without using the operating system cache. In Seq-test the program measures how long it takes to read a 1 GB file to write respectively. 4K test the read and write performance is determined at random 4K blocks. The 4K-64 corresponds to the test Third 4K procedure except that the read and write operations are distributed to 64 threads. This test should SSDs pose with Native Command Queuing (NCQ), differences between the IDE operation mode where NCQ is not supported, and the AHCI mode. The additional compression test can measure the power of the SSD in response to the compressibility of the data. This is especially for the controllers that use to increase the performance and life of the cell compression, important. In the first three synthetic tests and the compression test, the size of the text file is 1 GB. Finally, the access time of the SSD is calculated, wherein the access to read over the entire capacity of the SSD (Full Stroke) is determined. The write access test, however, is done with a 1 GB big test file.” In the AS SSD benchmark, we post pretty much picture-perfect results with 2,888 MB/s read and 2,879 MB/s write speeds. Looking at AS SSD compression benchmark we see a steady read speed of around 2868MB/s and write speed of 2850 MB/s with only a few drops to around 2,200 MB/s. After the initial benchmarks, we also put it through a little burning test by running some benchmarks in session to see how while the ceramic heat sink dissipated the heat. After running the benchmarks for a solid 15 minutes we only saw a peak temperature of 54c which quickly dropped to the mid-thirties once the benchmarking was stopped. This is about on par with my built-in heat sink included with my motherboard with a similar performing drive. Final Thoughts and Conclusion I can say with confidence that if you are doing a white-themed build, you do not have to sacrifice performance when choosing an M.2 drive. Not only does the Cardea Ceramic look great with its all-white heatsink it also brings you the performance you want in an M.2 NVMe drive. In all the benchmarks we put the Cardea Ceramic through it performed beyond my expectations. Specifically, in the ATTO and CrystalMark benchmarks it well exceeded its PCIe 3.0 rated speeds with it topping out at just above 3,400 MB/s in both read/write performance. This was a welcomed surprise and even when reaching these speeds above its rating it still managed to stay cool only topping out at 54c during a 15-minute benchmarking session. In the aesthetics department, the Cardea Ceramic will look great in any white-themed build especially ones that have gold accents. If I were to change something about the Cardea Ceramic’s color palette, I would have gone with a black PCB and silver writing. I think these changes would match better with black/white builds that do not contain any gold elements. Overall TeamGroup brought their A-game when creating the Cardea Ceramic and is the perfect addition to any build looking for a performant M.2 drive. Amazing Job TeamGroup!

TeamGroup CARDEA Ceramic C440 M.2 SSD Review

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