Team Group MP44 4 TB review

pcgamer.com:

It wasn't that long ago when new gaming PCs shipped with a 256 GB SSD as the main drive and a 2 TB HDD to store all your games on. Now you can easily replace both with a single big solid-state drive. And in the case of this Team Group MP44, with 4 TB of capacity, you can do so without having to spend a small fortune.

That said, paying over $220 for an SSD is still a lot of money, but it works out at less than six cents per gigabyte. For a drive with performance claims of 7,400 and 6,900 MB/s sustained read/write, that's about as cheap as it currently gets. So you'd be forgiven for thinking that Team Group must be using poor-quality components to keep the price down.

The MP44 uses the same controller and NAND flash memory modules as those in the Lexar NM790, and nobody has ever accused that SSD of being cheaply made. It is simply a case that Team Group has sourced the best value parts on the market and delivered them all in a package that's free of frills and fancy features.

For example, there's no DRAM cache to help maintain sustained performance. Instead, like all such DRAM-less SSDs, it uses part of its capacity in a pseudo-SLC mode. NAND flash comes in various types (SLC, TLC, QLC, etc) and the YMTC 232-layer modules in the MP44 are TLC-based.

Capacity: 4 TB
Form factor: NVMe, 2280, M.2
Interface: PCIe 4.0 x4
Memory controller: MaxioTech MAP1602A
Flash memory: YMTC 232-layer TLC NAND
Rated performance: 7,400 MB/s sustained read, 6,900 MB/s sustained write
DRAM cache: None (dynamic SLC cache)
Endurance: 3,000 TBW
Warranty: Five years
Price: $225 | £268 | AU$585

These have less performance than SLC modules but they offer far more capacity. However, modern TLC chips can run some sections as if they're SLC, and the MP44 uses this high-speed section as a cache—buffering data transfers to ensure the drive keeps going at full speed for as long as possible.

Something else the MP44 doesn't have over some of the competition is a heatsink and with a maximum operating