TeamGroup's T-Force Cardea A440 (starts at $229.99; $469.90 for 2TB as tested), a PCI Express 4.0 internal solid-state drive, fulfills its promise of blazing sequential read and write speeds while providing a choice of solutions to keep the drive from overheating. Its high rated speeds and fancy heat dissipation hardware come at a steep price, and its program-loading scores fall short of its otherwise stellar benchmark test performance, but it deserves a long look from SSD shoppers ready to join the PCIe 4.0 generation.

Ready to Board the PCI Express Bus?

Although the A440 is backward-compatible with motherboards that support PCI Express 3.0, you'll need a chipset that supports PCI Express 4.0 to get anything like the read/write speeds discussed below and justify the premium you'll pay for the drive. This includes a select group of late-model desktop motherboards for AMD Ryzen processors, as well as Intel Z590-based boards designed for 10th and 11th Generation "Rocket Lake" CPUs. Laptops with accessible M.2 slots supporting PCIe 4.0 are still uncommon. On the desktop side of things, you'll probably have to upgrade your motherboard if it's a prebuilt system more than a year or two old, as few apart from the very newest support PCIe 4.0 M.2 drives (though some slightly older, top-shelf AMD platforms do).

The A440 is an internal SSD comprising 96-layer triple-level-cell (TLC) 3D NAND flash. It's built around a Phison E18 controller and uses the NVMe 1.4 protocol over its four-lane PCI Express 4.0 bus. The drive's M.2 Type 2280 (80mm long) "gumstick" format is standard fare for late-model internal SSDs. (New to some of this lingo? Be sure to check out our SSD dejargonizer.)

The A440 comes in two capacities, 1TB and 2TB. Based on Amazon's pricing, which has been more stable than that of some of the other online retailers we follow, the T-Force will cost you 23 cents per gigabyte for the 1TB model and 24 cents per gig for the 2TB version we tested. This puts it at the high end of the price scale for PCI Express 4.0 solid-state drives. The Editors' Choice award-winning Samsung SSD 980 Pro currently sells for 20 cents per gig in both 1TB and 2TB flavors, while another Editors' Choice honoree, the ADATA XPG Gammix S70, is currently about 17 and 18 cents per gigabyte for 1TB and 2TB respectively. The Mushkin Gamma sells for 19 cents per gig in both 1TB and 2TB guise.

The A440 is rated as reasonably durable, in keeping with its TLC NAND modules, with a terabytes written (TBW) rating of 700TBW for the 1TB model and 1,400TBW for the 2TB version. The "terabytes written" spec is an estimate, according to the manufacturer, of how much data can be written to the drive before some cells begin to fail and get taken out of service. (TBW tends to scale 1:1 with capacity, as it does here.) The A440's warranty is good for five years or until you hit the rated TBW figure in writes, whichever comes first. 

These durability ratings match those of the Mushkin Gamma and edge the Samsung 980 Pro, whose 1TB version is rated at 600TBW and 2TB version (introduced after our review was published) at 1,200TBW. The Silicon Power US70, also recently reviewed, is much more durable, with 1TB and 2TB models rated at 1,800TBW and 3,600TBW respectively. At the other extreme, the Mushkin Delta—which uses less write-durable QLC memory—is rated at just 200TBW for 1TB, 400TBW for 2TB, and 800TBW for 4TB.

Two Ways to Keep this Speedster Cool

TeamGroup is always up to the task of devising solutions to keep its internal SSDs from overheating, as we saw with the ceramic cooler of the T-Force Cardea Ceramic C440.

The A440 includes two cooling solutions. The first, suitable for laptops or tight spaces on motherboards, is a flat, thin graphene heat spreader—similar to the one found on the company's T-Force Cardea IOPS—which attaches to the drive with a sticky strip.

The other is a large aluminum heatsink for roomier desktop environments. This finned device, black with gold trim, is similar to the heatsinks that come with the IOPS and the T-Force Cardea II.

We tested the Cardea A440 drive, however, with neither of those solutions, instead using the standard over-slot heatsink already in place on our Asus Prime X299 testbed's mainboard for the sake of consistent results. This large heatsink, which spreads over the slot and extends over the chipset as well, should allow for greater surface area and cooling than any passive add-on heatsink with the dimensions of an 80mm M.2 drive.

As for software, TeamGroup points to its Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T) utility, which can be downloaded from the company's website. S.M.A.R.T. lets you view system info; drive info such as capacity, temperature, and bytes written and read; and test sequential read and write speeds using Crystal DiskMark. It is not, however, a full SSD management software suite such as Samsung offers with its Magician and Data Migration tools. With the A440, you'll have to provide your own utilities for tasks like drive copying.

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Testing the A440: Zippy Read/Write and 4K Write, Mediocre Program-Launch Scores

We test PCI Express 4.0 internal SSDs on a testbed with an MSI X570 motherboard, featuring an AMD Ryzen CPU, 16GB of Corsair Dominator DDR4 memory clocked to 3,600MHz, and a discrete graphics card. (See more about how we test SSDs.)

PCMark 10 Overall Storage Test

The PCMark 10 overall storage benchmark from independent test developer UL runs a full suite of typical drive-access tasks. The scores below tagged as the Overall Storage Test score are the software's sanctioned results, representing how well a drive does throughout the entire PCMark 10 run.

Following the Overall results are some more granular measures derived from PCMark 10's background "traces." These simulate how quickly a drive is capable of executing the key kinds of file reads to launch a particular program or, in the case of the Windows 10 trace, completing the operating system startup procedure.

Next comes a game-launching test set, which simulates how swiftly a drive can read shallow-depth small random 4K packages, one of the more commonly used file-block sizes for game installations. Another launch test predicts performance for Adobe creative apps; as anyone who works with video in Premiere Pro or images in Photoshop can tell you, loading these powerful programs can leave you waiting.

Finally, the PCMark 10 copy tests are also derived from PCMark 10 traces. These numbers might look low compared with the straight sequential-throughput numbers achieved in benchmarks like Crystal DiskMark 6.0 and AS-SSD, seen below, but that's due to the way scores are calculated and the nature of (and differences between) the source data sets.

The A440's PCMark 10 scores were generally middling. Its overall storage score was about average among the PCIe 4.0 drives we have tested. It did best in the ISO Copy test, but was below par in the Windows 10 Boot test.

Sequential Speed and Copy Tests

The Crystal DiskMark 6.0 sequential tests provide a more traditional measure, simulating best-case, straight-line transfers of large files. After that comes a series of file and folder transfers done in the SSD benchmarking utility AS-SSD. This trio of tests involves copying large files or folders from one location on the test drive to another.

We clocked the A440's sequential read and write speeds in Crystal DiskMark at 6,531MBps read and 6,362MBps write, a bit short of its rated 7,000MBps read and 6,900MBps write. While most internal SSDs score reasonably close to their manufacturers' sequential read/write ratings in this test, the ones with the highest rated speeds often lag a bit, although they're very fast compared with mid-range SSDs. For instance, the Mushkin Gamma recorded sequential read and write speeds of 6,450MBps and 6,357MBps respectively, a bit short of its 7,175MBps and 6,800MBps maximum throughput ratings. Still, both the A440's and Gamma's write speeds easily beat all the other PCI Express 4.0 internal SSDs, and their read speeds were just short of the ADATA XPG Gammix S70 and Samsung SSD 980 Pro at the top of their class.

Although the A440's 4K random read score was average, it had the highest 4K write score of all the drives in our test group. The T-Force's AS-SSD copy scores were excellent as well, landing at or near the top of a small group of elite drives in the ISO Speed, Program Speed, and Game Speed tests.

Fast, Cool, and Pricey

As we anticipated from its high rated speeds, the A440 proved to have some zip to it, delivering high scores in the Crystal DiskMark sequential read and write tests as well as an impressive 4K write score and acing the AS-SSD copy tests as well. Its scores in the PCMark 10 benchmarks were more mortal, with overall storage performance in the middle of the PCIe 4.0 pack, a fast ISO Copy score, and middling program-launch scores.

On a cost-per-gigabyte basis, the A440 is more expensive than most of the PCI Express 4.0 drives we've tested. Its not-so-secret weapons are the two heat-dissipation devices included with the drive. TeamGroup is not alone in providing physical thermal solutions, which become more important with high-performance drives—the ADATA S70, for example, also comes with an aluminum heat sink and managed benchmark scores that rivaled and in some cases topped the A440's while costing less. Nevertheless, the TeamGroup T-Force Cardea A440 is well worth considering if you're looking for a PCIe 4.0 speedster and you're not pinching pennies.