Team Group T-Force Cardea A440 | 1TB | M.2 2280 | PCIe 4.0 | 7,000MB/s read | 5,500MB/s write | $99.99$59.99 at Newegg (save $40)
If you're looking for great PCIe 4.0 performance but don't want to spend a lot of money, this Team Group drive is the perfect choice. It's more than quick enough for most users' needs and that big heatsink will keep things nice and cool, helping to prevent any thermal throttling.
Price check: Amazon $59.99
You've possible never heard of the name Team Group before, but it's a company that's been producing and supplying DRAM modules and flash memory for the commercial and consumer PC industry since 1997. These days, it has a solid reputation and its SSDs are especially good.
This T-Force Cardea A440 model is a perfect example of that. On paper, you're not getting anything very special, compared to the competition, but the components are all top-notch. We were mighty impressed with the drive when we first tested the 2TB version, and our only issue was that it was a bit pricey back then. Fast forward a couple of years and the prices of flash memory and SSDs have shrunk dramatically.
Underneath that beefy heatsink are a collection of 96-layer TLC flash chips made by Micron, 2GB of SK Hynix DDR4-3200, and an E18 controller from Phison. Those are perfectly decent parts and although TLC (triple-level cell) isn't the fastest flash storage out there, it's more than good for most users' needs. To get anywhere near the A440's maximum performance, it will need to be installed in a PC that fully supports PCIe 4.0; it will still work in an older PCIe 3.0 M.2 slot, but the peak data speeds will be half as fast.
Unlike a lot of cheap SSDs, this one sports onboard DRAM which stores the big map of where
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