TeamGroup TForce Cardea A440 PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD Review

Testing

Test Platform:

• CPU       Intel Core i9-11900k
• Mobo   ASRock Z590 Taichi
• RAM      16GB Corsair Dominator Platinum 3200MHz
• GPU       Nvidia RTX 2080 FE
• OS SSD  Corsair MP600 2TB

Test Platform: 2

• CPU       AMD Ryzen 9 5950X
• Mobo   ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Formula
• RAM      64Gb Viper Steel 3600MHz
• GPU       Nvidia RTX 3090 FE
• OS SSD  Samsung 960 Pro 2TB

CrystalDiskInfo

Teamgroup’s Cardea A440 connects to both our test systems at PCIe 4.0 x4 and uses NVM Express version 1.4.

CrystalDiskMark

“CrystalDiskMark is designed to quickly test the performance of your hard drives. Currently, the program allows measuring sequential and random read/write speeds.”

Our Intel Test bench shows better sequential reads and read and write 4k randoms across the board. In either case, Writes seem to top out around 5.45GB/s, a touch lower than advertised. Reads clear the 7GB/s mark on Intel so that matches up.

Overall IOPS are quite good with writes clearing 88k and reads almost at 19k.

Latency comes in a touch lower than expected, which is great as it has a lot more impact than overall high queue depth sequential speeds.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

Again we see Teamgroup’s Cardea A440 holding a notable advantage running from an Intel 11^th Gen platform than from AMD’s latest. Performance is still great either way.

Anvil’s Storage Utilities

Anvil gives us a score of around 23.5k points, some of that attributed to raw speed, but the overall low latency helps considerably here.

Black Magic Disk Speed Test

Disk Speed Test is an easy-to-use tool to quickly measure and certify your disk performance for working with high-quality video! Simply click the start button and Disk Speed Test will write test your disk using large blocks of data, and then display the result. Disk Speed Test will continue to test writes and reads from your disk so you can evaluate both performance and readability over time.

BlackMagic’s Disk Speed Test is in need of a serious update these days. On most PCIe 4.0 drives, the read and write segments are so short that they cant accurately measure performance. It does however show that the drive is more than capable of handling video editing on common formats, even in raw mode.

Temperature Testing

We checked peak temperatures as registered by CrystalDiskInfo on the Cardea A440 with just the bare drive, with graphite heat spreader installed, and with the heatsink installed. We also tested each configuration with modest airflow from a case fan about 4 inches (10cm) away as some airflow is going to be typical of a gamer’s desktop.
Interestingly, the Graphite heat spreader seems to act more as an insulator overall both with and without airflow. The heatsink does make a notable difference with much cooler temps both with and without airflow. Idle temps fell to 29-30C in all configurations which is acceptable.