At a look
Professional’s Ranking
Execs
- As quick as they arrive
- Giant aluminum warmth sink or graphene warmth spreader
- Sustains efficiency throughout lengthy writes
Our Verdict
The Cardea A440 Professional is arguably the quickest NVMe SSD we’ve examined. It’s additionally priced as such.
Value When Reviewed
$280 for 2TB
Greatest Costs At present: Teamgroup Cardea A440 Professional NVMe SSD (2TB)
$135.99
Free
I’ll simply lower to the chase: The Teamgroup Cardea A440 Professional (TM8FPR002) ripped although our check suite in tremendous trend, besting such quick drives as Seagate’s FireCuda 530 and SK Hynix’s Platinum P41—our present decide for finest NVMe PCIe 4.0. Let’s check out the way it compares in all different respects.
This assessment is a part of our ongoing roundup of the perfect SSDs. Go there for data on competing merchandise and the way we examined them.
Cardea A440 Professional: Value, design, specs
There are two decisions in warmth dissipation accessible for the A440 Professional: the skinny graphene kind proven within the photos, and a slightly giant aluminum heatsink. Most customers shall be tremendous with the graphene, and it’s clearly the selection for laptop computer upgrades, however avid gamers or professionals placing steady stress on the drive can hold the temps down and keep away from thermal throttling through the use of the bigger heatsink.
The 1TB taste of the A440 Professional prices $136—not dangerous for an SSD this quick. The 2TB is $280, and the 4TB is $790—once more not dangerous for a pro-level SSD, however fairly a bit greater than than the entry-level competitors. Including the aluminum heatsink at buy prices solely $5 to $10, a discount relating to such extras.
The Teamgroup Cardea A440 Professional NVMe SSD with the graphene warmth spreader possibility. An aluminum heatsink SKU can be accessible for modest $5 to $10 surcharge.
Do the maths on the worth per terabyte, and until you really want most capability in a single slot, you’ll get monetary savings by shopping for 4 1TB, or two 2TB A440 Execs. Not quite a lot of motherboards have 4 M.2 slots, however four-slot x16 PCIe adapters can be found for underneath $50. In case your laptop helps PCIe bifurcation and RAID, there you go.
The 22mm broad, 88mm lengthy PCIe 4.0 x4 A440 Professional sports activities nothing however top-notch parts, together with: a Phison Phison PS5018-e18-41 controller, 1GB of DRAM per 1TB of capability for major caching duties, and 176-layer TLC NAND. Most PCIe 4.0 drives, particularly these with DRAM, are amongst your pricier choices.
Teamgroup backs the Cardea A440 Professional with a five-year guarantee and 700TBW (1TB mannequin), 1,400TBW (2TB), and three,000TBW (4TB) scores. These are common, not enterprise- or FireCuda 530-level TBW—i.e., terabytes the drive can write. Consider it just like the mileage in a automotive guarantee. When the time interval or the TBW is exceeded, the guarantee ceases to use.
Cardea A440 Professional: Efficiency
Although it didn’t win each race, the Cardea A440 Professional received sufficient of them that we may arguably name it the quickest NVMe SSD we’ve examined. The primary proof of that is within the CrystalDiskMark 8 sequential throughput numbers proven beneath.
Word that the Seagate 530’s numbers are new and should not match these in our earlier assessment.
The A440 Professional was solely a few seconds off the all-time non-RAID document for our 48GB transfers. Meaning it’s actual good in the actual world. These outcomes are all throughout the margin of statistical error for this check, however 21 and 22 seconds studying/writing our 48GB single file continues to be spectacular.
The check that the Cardea A440 Professional actually aced was our lengthy 450GB write. This was the 2TB model of the A440 Professional. You may not get fairly as spectacular a efficiency with the 1TB model resulting from much less NAND to be used as secondary cache.
Total, the Teamgroup Cardea A440 Professional is a really, very quick drive. Presumably the quickest factor on the market. A pleasant debut in our labs for Teamgroup.
Inner drive assessments presently make the most of Home windows 11 64-bit operating on an MSI MEG X570/AMD Ryzen 3700X combo with 4 16GB Kingston 2666MHz DDR4 modules, a Zotac (Nvidia) GT 710 1GB x2 PCIe graphics card, and an Asmedia ASM3242 USB 3.2×2 card. Copy assessments make the most of an ImDisk RAM disk utilizing 58GB of the 64GB complete reminiscence.
Every check is carried out on a newly formatted and TRIM’d drive so the outcomes are optimum. Over time, as a drive fills up, efficiency will lower resulting from much less NAND for caching and different components. The efficiency numbers proven apply solely to the drive of the capability examined. SSD efficiency can range by capability resulting from extra or fewer chips to shotgun reads/writes throughout and the quantity of NAND accessible for secondary caching.
Backside line
One of the best typically prices extra, and the Cardea A440 Professional is arguably that, so I’ll lower it some slack on the pricing. (I’d like to have this SSD in my system.) However costs change quickly today, and the drives we’ve in contrast it to are very quick. Examine them out and store rigorously.
