TeamGroup T-Force Cardea IOPS M.2 SSD Review

When looking for a new M.2 NVMe drive little bit of performance helps whether you are looking for faster boot times or quicker game loading. These situations are exactly what TeamGroup hopes to solve with their new Cardea IOPS M.2 NVMe drive. This drive was built with a primary focus of exceptional IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) performance with it boasting IOPS of 680K read and 670K write. The Cardea IOPS also features fast read/write speeds of 3400MBs/3000MBs, includes both an aluminum and graphene heatsink, and comes with a 5-year limited warranty. The Cardea IOPS currently only comes in a 1TB configuration and can be bought at NewEgg for $149.99. We would like to thank TeamGroup for sending us the 1TB Cardea IOPS 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. Their professional research and development team 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.” TeamGroup’s take on the Cardea IOPS: Winning every crucial game without lagging T-FORCE CARDEA IOPS SSD leads the industry by offering up to 680K/670K IOPS of top performance, and breaking the limit of IOPS, so gamers never have to worry about the read/write speed. Game loading will be completed first and provide the key to winning every game without lagging. Features: Winning every crucial game without lagging Enjoy two cooling patents at once Ultimate performance Smart algorithm enhances stability and durability Specifications: Model CARDEA IOPS Interface PCIe Gen3 x4 with NVMe 1.3 Capacity 1TB Voltage DC +3.3V Operation Temperature 0˚C ~ 70˚C Storage Temperature -40˚C ~ 85˚C Terabyte Written 1TB / >1,665TB Performance Crystal Disk Mark: IOPS: 1TB Read/Write: up to 3,400/3,000 MB/s 1TB Read/Write: 680K/670K IOPS Max Weight 9g (with Graphene heat sink) Dimensions 80.0(L) x 22.0(W) x 3.7(H) mm (with Graphene heat sink) 80.0(L) x 23.4(W) x 12.9(H) mm (with Aluminum heat sink) Humidity RH 90% under 40°C (operational) Vibration 80Hz~2,000Hz/20G Shock 1,500G/0.5ms MTBF 1,500,000 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 Like the Cardea Zero we reviewed earlier the Cardea IOPS features a blue PCB and includes a warranty sticker on the back. On the warranty sticker, we find the Cardea IOPS model number, serial number, and states it has a 5-year warranty. Since the Cardea IOPS arrives with neither of the heatsinks applied, we can see what chips are included on the drive. The Cardea IOPS features a PHISON PS5012-E12 controller which has a maximum 3400/3000MHz read/write speed and 600K IOPS for both read/write. Accompanying the PHISON controller is a Kinston DDR3/3L cache which has a capacity of 2Gb and a speed of 1866Mbps. TeamGroup’s Cardea IOPS provides you with two cooling options, their patented graphene heat spreader or the more commonly seen aluminum heat spreader. This allows you to choose the best solution to suit your build. If you are looking for the best cooling, you would go with aluminum since it provides 6% better heat dissipation than the graphene heat spreader. If you tight on space, you may go with graphene which sports a low profile to fit in those tight spaces. Please note if you do choose the graphene option it is likely only good for one application as when we removed it from the unit it ended up getting pretty bent and could not be reapplied. System Configuration & Testing To test CARDEA IOPS 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 2070 Super Gaming OC OS Drive: Crucial P1 1000GB OS: Window 10 Professional X64 Like I do for all my drive benchmarking sessions, I use CrystalDiskInfo to check out some details of the CARDEA IOPS. We set up the CARDEA IOPS as a secondary drive and see it's an NVMe 1.3 drive utilizing PCIe 3.0 x4. 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" In the ATTO benchmark, it performed as expected with the number scoring just below the rated speed with 3210MBs read and 2830MBs write. 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 the CARDEA IOPS posts a picture-perfect score with read/write speeds of 3446/3028MBs. 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. The program has gone through a series of beta and release candidate builds already and is currently available as Release Candidate 3. It is usually linked from this forum thread, which currently is not the case for the RC build which you can download here directly. You can’t use previous builds as they are set to expire automatically. In Anvil we see the sequential read speed lower than expected but this quite normal for this benchmark. Looking at the IOPS we did notice it was about 150K short of the advertised speeds which were a little surprising. Though it's possible Anvil also posts lower IOPS scores as we see in the read/write speeds. AS SSD 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. As expecting the SEQ speeds in the AS SSD benchmark are slightly lower than the rated 3400/3000MBs read/write with speeds of 2893/2848MBs. Looking at AS SSD compression benchmark we see a steady read speed of around 2850MB/s and write speed of 2350 MB/s with 2 drops to about 2100 MB/s. After we ran all the benchmarks, we also did some temperature testing for each of the included heatsinks. We ran the stress tests using the following three configurations: Graphene Heatsink Aluminum Heatsink Motherboard M.2 Heatsink Regardless of the applied heatsink, the drive idled a little above room temperature at 24C. When we ran the CARDEA IOPS with the aluminum heat spreader and motherboard heatsink, we reached a top temperature of 49C. With the graphene heat spreader installed we seen an increase of 11C with a top temperature of 60C. This is a little higher than expected but still well within its operating temperatures. Final Thoughts and Conclusion TeamGroup delivers another great M.2 drive with the CARDEA IOPS’ fast speeds and great cooling options. It had no trouble hitting its rated speed of 3400/3000MBS read/write in our CrystalMark benchmark and performed as expected in the others. One this we did note in the Anvil benchmark is we were not able to see the drive hit its advertised 670K/680K IOPS. This could just be a difference in testing mythology or software and since it did hit its rated speed it didn’t concern me. One of my favorite features of this drive is that TeamGroup included two choices for cooling. So whether you are tight on space or your motherboard didn’t come with a heatsink the CARDEA IOPS has you covered. If it were my build I would lean towards using the aluminum heatsink for its better cooling if space isn’t an issue. Overall, the CARDEA IOPS delivers exceptional performance at a great price making and is a great choice for any build. Great Job TeamGroup!

Final Thoughts and Conclusion

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