Team Group earned acclaimed for getting M.2 SSD cooling right, with its Cardea M.2 NVMe SSD. A chunky aluminium heatsink cools the controller and MLC NAND flash chips, to help the drive churn out some of the highest sustained performance figures in its segment. Team Group designed its notebook/SFF friendly variant, the Cardea-Z (or Cardea Zero).

The Cardea-Z features the same PCB, same controller, and same NAND flash as the original Cardea, but replaces the chunky heatsink with an aluminium heatspreader, which is just a thin sheet of metal. This makes the drive fit into notebooks and certain SFF desktops. Its controller takes advantage of the NVMe 1.2 protocol, and is mated with MLC NAND flash memory. It comes in capacities of 240 GB and 480 GB, churning out the same rated performance figures as the original - up to 2,600 MB/s reads with up to 1,400 MB/s writes for the 240 GB variant, and up to 2,650 MB/s reads, with up to 1,450 MB/s writes for the 480 GB variant. Both variants offer over 180,000 IOPS 4K random access speeds.