TEAMGROUP CARDEA ZERO Z340 512GB M.2 PCIE GEN3X4 SSD REVIEW

Introduction In today’s world where content creation is at an all-time high, the need for faster drives is greater than ever. With higher speeds you’re often faced higher temperatures which could result in the drive throttling, TeamGroup hopes to combat this with its new NVMe SSD the CARDEA Zero Z340. The CARDEA Zero not only sports blistering read/write speeds of 3400/3000 MB/s but also contains a patented graphene heatsink to improve cooling performance by 9%. The CARDEA Zero Z340 comes in 3 different models 1TB/512GB/256GB with the 1TB/512GB available on NewEgg for $122.99/$79.99. We would like to thank TeamGroup for sending us the 512GB Cardea Zero Z340 to review. About TeamGroup Team Group Inc. was founded in 1997 in Taiwan and is one of the leading memory storage manufacturers in the world. They provide a variety of products such as Memory, Solid State Drives, SD Cards, USB drives, and mobile accessories. With their professional research and development teams, it allows them to produce high-quality and innovative products. TeamGroup is also well praised by the industry and customers by adhering to the corporate philosophy of “Integrity, Innovation, Professionalism, Efficiency, Discipline, and Simplicity.” Notable Features: Patented graphene cooling technology High speed read/write performance Ultra-thin and lightweight structure All-around smart management technology Technical Specifications: Model CARDEA ZERO Z340 Interface PCIe Gen3 x4 with NVMe 1.3 Capacity 256GB / 512GB / 1TB[3] Voltage DC +3.3V Operation Temperature 0˚C ~ 70˚C Storage Temperature -40˚C ~ 85˚C Terabyte Written 256GB / >380TB 512GB / >800TB 1TB / >1,665TB[4] Performance Crystal Disk Mark: IOPS: 256GB Read/Write: up to 3,000/1,000 MB/s 256GB Read/Write: 200K/200K IOPS Max 512GB Read/Write: up to 3,400/2,000 MB/s 512GB Read/Write: 350K/300K IOPS Max 1TB Read/Write: up to 3,400/3,000 MB/s[1] 1TB Read/Write: 450K/400K IOPS Max[1] Weight 9g Dimensions 80.0(L) x 22.0(W) x 3.7(H) mm Humidity RH 90% under 40°C (operational) Vibration 80Hz~2,000Hz/20G Shock 1,500G/0.5ms MTBF 2,000,000 hours Operating System System Requirements: Windows 10 / 8.1 / 8 / 7 / Vista[5] Linux 2.6.33 or later Warranty 5-year limited warranty[6] A Closer Look TeamGroup’s CARDEA ZERO Z340 arrives in a red/black package with the NVMe drive secured in a plastic shell. On the front of the package is a sticker that denotes the drive's capacity with our review samples being the 512GB model. Looking to the left we find some information about the CARDEA Zero’s super-slim graphene which aim’s to increase cooling performance by 9%. Moving to the back TeamGroup goes a little more in-depth of the CARDEA ZERO Z340 specifications with our model sporting 3400/2000 MB/s read/write speeds, 0-70C operating temperature, and using the PCIe Gen3 x4 with NVMe 1.3 interface. Popping the CARDEA ZERO from its plastic case it’s nice to see that TeamGroup went with a blue PCB rather than the vibrate green we sometimes see. The PCB with gold contacts perfectly matches the black graphene heatsink which has copper writing/accents on the top. Handling the drive it is much lighter than you would expect for an NVMe that includes a heatsink. Flipping the drive to the back we find the always so common warranty sticker with the CARDEA ZERO sporting an impressive 5-year warranty. System Configuration & Testing To test CARDEA ZERO we placed it on our open-air teat bench with the following specifications: CPU: i9 9900K Motherboard: Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Pro RAM: 2 x 8GB Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB @ 3200MHz GPU: XFX RX5600XT THICC II OS Drive: Crucial P1 1000GB OS: Window 10 Professional X64 Like I do for all my drive benchmarking sessions, I use CrystalDiskInfo to check out some details of the CARDEA ZERO Z340. We find the CARDEA ZERO setup up as a secondary drive D: and idling at a cool 28C. like mentioned on the packaging the CARDEA ZERO is setup using PCIe 3.0 x4 with the NVMe 1.3 standard. I will be running the drive through various benchmarking applications to see how it fairs under different workloads. These applications include: ATTO Disk Benchmark CrystalDiskMark 6.0 Anvil’s Storage Utilities AS SSD ATTO Disk Benchmark “As the industry's leading provider of high-performance storage & network connectivity products, ATTO has created a widely-accepted Disk Benchmark freeware utility to help measure storage system performance. As one of the top tools utilized in the industry, Disk Benchmark identifies performance in hard drives, solid-state drives, RAID arrays as well as connections to storage. Top drive manufacturers, like Hitachi, build and test every drive using the ATTO Disk Benchmark" Running the CARDEA ZERO through the ATTO benchmark we see a peak write performance of 2310 MB/s and read performance of 3200 MB/s. This echoes what we found on the packaging with read performance just 180 MBs shy of the maximum 3400MB/s and write performance exceeding the rated 2000 MB/s by 310 MB/s. CrystalDiskMark 6.0 “CrystalDiskMark is designed to quickly test the performance of your hard drives. Currently, the program allows measuring sequential and random read/write speeds." In CrystalDiskMark benchmark the CARDEA ZERo Z340 exceeds its rated speed with a blistering 3458 MB/s read and 2467 MB/s write. Anvil's Storage Utilities “Anvil's Storage Utilities is a powerful tool that was designed to provide you with a simple means of assessing the read and write performance of your Solid State Drive or Hard Disk Drive. The benchmark tool helps you monitor and check the response time of your unit as well as view the system information collected using Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). Anvil’s Storage Utilities has been designed to be the most comprehensive benchmark tool for Solid State Drives on the market. That does not mean that you can’t use it for conventional platter-based drives as well, but you do get the most out of the program when you test the speed and performance of SSDs with it. The program has gone through a series of beta and release candidate builds already and is currently available as Release Candidate 3. It is usually linked from this forum thread, which currently is not the case for the RC build which you can download here directly. You can’t use previous builds as they are set to expire automatically. You can run a benchmark right away by selecting a drive from the menu at the top right or check out the settings first to make sure everything is configured correctly here. Here you can simulate a compression level of the text file, e.g. database, application, or uncompressed, and whether you’d like to use the same test file on consecutive runs or generate a new one every time. As far as benchmarks go, you can run a standard SSD benchmark that is testing read, write, or both performances of the drive, or run threaded IO benchmarks only.” In Anvil we see the sequential read speed lower than expected but this quite normal for this benchmark. AS SSD “The AS SSD benchmark determines the performance of Solid State Drives (SSD). The tool contains six synthetic and three copy tests. The synthetic tests determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD. These tests are carried out without using the operating system cache. In Seq-test the program measures how long it takes to read a 1 GB file to write respectively. 4K test the read and write performance is determined at random 4K blocks. The 4K-64 corresponds to the test Third 4K procedure except that the read and write operations are distributed to 64 threads. This test should SSDs pose with Native Command Queuing (NCQ), differences between the IDE operation mode where NCQ is not supported, and the AHCI mode. The additional compression test can measure the power of the SSD in response to the compressibility of the data. This is especially for the controllers that use to increase the performance and life of the cell compression, important. In the first three synthetic tests and the compression test, the size of the text file 1 GB. Finally, the access time of the SSD is calculated, wherein the access to read over the entire capacity of the SSD (Full Stroke) is determined. The write access test, however, is done with a 1 GB big test file.” Like Anvil the AS SSD benchmark also reports low read speeds but the CARDEA ZERO has yet again well exceeding its rated 2000 MB/s write speeds. Looking at AS SSD compression benchmark we see a steady read speed of around 2830MB/s and write speed of 2380 MB/s with 2 drops to 1482 MB/s. In addition to running the CARDEA ZERO Z340 through these benchmarks, I also paid close attention to its temperature under load. After running the CARDEA ZERO under load for some time we saw a peak temperature of 54C which was much cooler than our Crucial P1 which hit 66C under the same conditions. Since the heatsink on CARDEA ZERO is quite thin I was able to reduce the temperature by another 8C to a cool 46C when I installing my motherboard’s M.2 heatsink. Final Thoughts and Conclusion So did TeamGroup’s CARDEA ZERO Z340 live up to its claims of improved cooling performance? In our testing, we would 100% agree with this statement. Not only did the CARDEA ZERO exceed its rated speeds at an extremely fast 3458 MB/s read and 2467 MB/s write it also ran 12C cooler than our other NVMe. This extra cooling can most likely be attributed to TeamGroup’s patented graphene heatsink which easily achieved the marketed 9% cooling performance. Also, the attached heatsink is thin enough where I could still apply the M.2 heatsink that came with my motherboard with improved the temperatures by another 8C. Performance isn’t the only thing the CARDEA ZERO has going for it as it’s no slouch in the looks department. With its dark blue PCB and copper accented black heatsink, it looks great installed in the GigaByte Z390 Aorus even without the heatsinks included with the motherboard. TeamGroup’s CARDEA ZERO Z340 has the trifecta everyone is looking for in an M.2 drive with excellent performance, great cooling, and the looks to match. Great Job TeamGroup!

Final Thoughts and Conclusion

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