Team Group so far had their ‘T-Force Gaming’ products with a lot of high performing and eye catching products. Today they are expanding their SSD family to a new branch which they are calling the ‘Creator (T-Create)‘ which will cover memory kits and solid state drives.
The SSDs will have the ‘Classic’ series (which we will review today) and the ‘Expert‘ – this one will offer the industry’s first 12-year ultra long term warranty. So it’s pretty obvious what’s the goal here with the new Creator branding – they will focus on extra stability, longevity and peace of mind.
TeamGroup Inc. was founded in 1997 in Taiwan. TEAMGROUP Inc. possesses professional research and development capabilities, high quality products, rapid productivity, a tightly-knit global sales network and complete customer services. TEAMGROUP mainly produces its own brand of memory modules, memory cards, USB flash drives, solid state disks, peripheral series, mobile accessories and industrial applications. Gaming competitions have drawn worldwide attention in the recent years, so TEAMGROUP integrated its gaming memory modules into “T-FORCE” product line which is specifically designed for people who pursuit extreme high speed and excellent performance.
Prices and Availability
The Classic M.2 SSD series so far only offers a 1TB variant for around $100. This is priced really well considering they use TLC cells and as you can see from a quick comparison with a Samsung EVO 970. Of course the EVO is faster but the T-Create is geared for extra stability as per their claims.
*27.12.20 Update – Don’t forget to check the video review as well !*
Presentation and Specification
*Courtesy of their website.*
It’s nice to see that they are using at least 3D TLC cells to be sure it offers respectable endurance considering its main tagline. To further emphasise the main idea, it even supports high rate LDPC (Low Density parity Check) ECC functionality that ensures data safety and integrity. Also it offers the same warranty and TBW as a Samsung 970 EVO 1TB at 5 years and 600 TB written.
Using the M.2 PCIe NVMe 1.3 Gen3x4 interface it offers peak read/write speeds of 2100/1700 MB/s with IOPs up to 220K/200K (4K Random Read/Write).
Visual Inspection and Installation
It comes shipped in a minimalist enclosure with every important info printed on the front.
On the back it gives you a quick installation guide and an idea of the theoretical performance in CrystalDiskMark.
It uses a single sided PCB and on the back it has this sticker that contains besides the branding, the detailed product number – TM8FPE001T.
The front has this minimalist grey metal heatsink.
Testing methodology
* Synthetic and real life big file transfer tests – a game folder of 67 GB of mixed files
* All test subjects have identical content – at around 30-40% used space
* All SSDs were secure-erased before our tests started
* Between tests, drives are left idle for 1 minute to allow them to flush and reorganise their internal data.
* Steps have been taken to ensure that the CPU’s power-saving features don’t interfere with any of our results. All of the CPU’s low-power states have been disabled.
* In order to minimise random variation, each of the real-life performance tests are run a few times with reboots in-between tests to reduce the impact of disk cache.
* (SATA SSDs only) Make sure you use a SATA 6Gbps capable motherboard and a matching cable to avoid bottle-necking. Then double check in the BIOS that you have the AHCI mode activated for another maximum performance tip.
Hardware used:
– CPU: AMD Ryzen 3 3100 AM4 – 4c/8t @ 65W TDP
– CPU Cooler: Asetek 645LT 92mm AIO
– Motherboard: ASUS ROG STRIX B550-i Gaming mITX @ BIOS 0608
– RAM: 32GB (2×16) Corsair LPX Vengeance 3600 MHz CL18
– SSD: T-Force Cardea Liquid 512GB TLC PCIe NVMe
– Video card(s): ASUS GTX 1080 STRIX A8G
– PSU: Corsair SF750 SFX Platinum
– Case: DAN A4-SFX V4.1 ITX
– Case fans 92 mm: Noctua NF-A9x14 HS-PWM.chromax.Black.swap
Competition SSDs:
– Samsung 970 EVO Plus 2TB TLC M.2 PCIe NVMe
– Samsung 860 PRO 1TB QLC SATA 2.5″
– Crucial P1 M.2 1TB QLC PCIe NVMe
– Crucial P2 M.2 500GB TLC PCIe NVMe
– Team Group T-Force DELTA MAX RGB 500GB TLC SATA 2.5″
– Team Group T-Force Cardea Liquid 512GB TLC PCIe NVMe
Software:
– Windows 10 Pro x64 Version 20H2
– HD Tune Pro v5.70
– ATTO v4.01
– Crystal Disk Mark v7.0.0
Testing, Results and Analysis
First, we start with HD Tune Pro – which is a hard disk / SSD utility with many functions. It can be used to measure the drive’s performance, scan for errors, check the health status (S.M.A.R.T.), securely erase all data and much more. It position itself quite respectably.
Moving to the next utility – Crystal Disk Mark – this one is designed to quickly test the performance of your drives. The T-Create ticks the advertised rated speeds even at ~50% storage utilisation.
Moving to the “write” test, which is even more important in real life scenarios. Again it reaches the full max theoretical write speeds.
To conclude the synthetic test, ATTO – is another performance measurement tool to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host bus adaptors (HBAs), hard drives and SSD drives.
Now let’s see how practical it is in some other real life scenarios like app installation. Let’s take the full suite of Microsoft Office 2019 and time it.
Loading times in Adobe’s popular photo editor Photoshop are as follows:
Our final performance test is to import a 5GB 4K60fps 70Mbps .mkv video sample file into Premier Pro CC and measure how much time it takes to process it in order to be ready to edit it in the timeline.
Now for some temperature numbers under a benchmark run. Mind you it sits in the hottest place possible on this particular case, sandwiched between the motherboard and the wall for the GPU chamber, thus no airflow at all – so the numbers are really good.
The final practical test revolves around the mixed files 67 GB installation folder for The Division 2 titles that has been copied onto the T-Create Classic 1TB. It had a pretty bumpy ride oscillating from 500-900 MB/s (some thermal throttling maybe) as the write average. From this test alone I can’t pinpoint how big the SLC buffer/cache is but overall, the sustained performance is good.
Conclusion
Team Group has created another branch of interesting products with the focus on stability and reliability. The Classic series is the budget option and it surely is a best buy if you are looking for an M.2 that will get the job done that ticks a lot of sensible boxes. The Expert series is their flagship range which I am very curios to check out soon. Until then, the T-Create Classic 1TB M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD gets our recommended rating since it achieves a really good balance of price/performance ratio.
The good:
+ Good price/performance ratio
+ Single sided PCB
+ Minimalist and reliable approach
+ TLC cells
+ 5 Years warranty
The bad:
– Not that high performing as some TLC or even QLC drives currently on the market
– Higher capacity options are needed
Glob3trotters “Best Buy” Award 4.5 out of 5
A lot of thanks to Team Group for supplying us with this item !
