Introduction

Team Group is a well-known Taiwanese hardware manufacturer with a long history of catering to the needs of enthusiasts and gamers from all over the globe. Their lineup includes DRAM memory and solid-state drives, and they also offer various memory cards and USB thumb drives.



Today we're testing the Team Group Z540, which is the company's new PCI-Express Gen 5 flagship drive, reaching speeds of up to 12 GB/s.
Just like drives from other vendors, the Z540 is sold as just the drive, without any heatsink. In the coming weeks, Team Group will offer a bundle of both the SSD and their Team Group AirFlow SSD cooler. This is an interesting bundle, because the cooler looks pretty impressive, which means it should achieve good temperatures without going overboard in terms of noise—unlike some other Gen 5 SSDs we've reviewed.
The Z540 utilizes the blazing fast PCI-Express 5.0 interface, which doubles the potential transfer rates over PCIe Gen 4. Internally, Team Group is using the Phison E26 controller, that also powers all the other currently available Gen 5 SSDs. Other vendors such as Samsung, WD, Kioxia, Silicon Motion and Innogrit are working on their own designs, but have nothing to show yet. For NAND flash the Z540 is using Micron's newest B58R 3D TLC NAND with 232-layers. As expected for a high-end drive, a DRAM cache chip is included. Compared to the Corsair MP700, our first Gen 5 SSD review, the Team Group comes with newer firmware (just like the SSTC Tiger Shark Elite) and support for 12 GB/s.

The Team Group Z540 with AirFlow bundle will be available in capacities of 1 TB ($200) and 2 TB ($300). The Z540 without cooler costs $150 / $260 at the moment. Endurance for these models is set to 700 TBW and 1400 TBW, respectively. Team Group includes a three-year warranty with the Z540 SSD.