Technology & Positioning
The Team Group A440 Lite 2 TB is a cost-optimized M.2 NVMe SSD that's designed to offer both good pricing and good performance. To achieve that goal it uses the relatively new Phison E27T controller, which was released on mass production drives at the beginning of this year. While it's designed to replace the aging E21, it still uses a cost-efficient 12 nanometer process at TSMC. Just like the Corsair MP600 Elite, which was the first E27 drive that we reviewed, Team Group opted for Toshiba 162-layer 3D TLC for their drive. As expected for a value-drive, the A440 Lite is a DRAM-less design, the E27T controller is optimized for that and there's also 64 MB of Host-Memory-Buffer (HMB). HMB allocates a tiny portion of the system's memory to help store the mapping tables of the SSD, to boost performance.

Synthetic Performance
Synthetic performance results of the A440 Lite are very impressive, in Random IOPS they are actually topping our charts. Phison has a long history of optimizing their controllers for typical synthetic reviewer workloads on an empty drive, but still that's some nice gains. I really like that mixed IO results are excellent, because during typical usage you'll never just have reads, or just writes. Actual usage patterns are always a mix of read and write operations, that's why mixed IO performance matters a lot.

Real-Life Performance
Our real-life testing runs actual games and applications, it does not replay disk traces, which means time spent on the CPU is realistically factored into the performance results. We also test with the drive filled to 80% of its capacity. This approach puts additional pressure on the various algorithms and the SLC cache, just like in real-life. In this testing the new Team Group SSD does very well, too, and can beat famous drives like the Samsung 980 and 980 Pro, Hynix Gold P31, and it's really close to the WD SN850, Solidigm P44 Pro and Kingston KC3000—all of those are eight-channel designs, while the A440 Lite makes do with only four channels. There are still a bunch of drives that are faster, like the Lexar NM790, Samsung 990 Pro and WD Black SN770, and of course the PCIe Gen 5 drives, which are much more expensive though.

SLC Cache / Sustained Performance
Team Group's drive comes with an SLC cache size of just 48 GB, which is tiny by today's standards, especially on a 2 TB variant. No idea why Team Group picked such a small size, the Corsair MP600 Elite, which uses the exact same hardware platform uses this configuration, too, so it seems it's part of the Phison reference drive specification. While 48 GB is still plenty for nearly all workloads, it's still smaller than virtually all competing drives. Filling the whole 2 TB capacity completed at 1.4 GB/s, which is a very good result, considering the drive's positioning.

Power Consumption / Heat
Our power consumption tests show that the Phison E27T is a highly energy-efficient design. It is able to successfully enter the lowest-power L1 ASPM power state, which is important for mobile devices, to not drain the battery when idle. Energy efficiency during read and writes is near the top of our charts, but there's still some more efficient designs, most notably the Maxiotech MAP1602 on drives like the Lexar NM790.

Thermal performance of the A440 Lite is alright, in our thermal stress test it does throttle fairly quickly. When we installed the included heat spreader foil, throttling was avoided for some extra time, which means the heat spreader does work. However, it simply lacks the mass to absorb a lot of heat, so power users might want to use a larger full-metal heatsink. For typical consumer workloads this is a non-issue though, because they don't run long enough to cause enough heat buildup.

Pricing & Alternatives
The Team Group A440 Lite 2 TB is widely available at a price of around $120, which is quite competitive for a high-end Gen 4 SSD, and much cheaper than the Corsair MP600 Elite, which sells for $165 and is the exact same drive. There's plenty of competition in this segment though from all the major vendors, using multiple controllers, not just Phison. One such example is Team Group's own G50, which is based on the Innogrit IG5220 and sells for just $105, with slightly lower performance that you'll probably never notice in real life. On the other hand, will you really notice a price difference of $15? For just another $15 more you could buy one of the MAP1602-based drives like the Lexar NM790 that offer a small performance increase, with better energy efficiency at the same time. Other notable alternatives are the WD SN580 ($115) and WD SN770 ($120), both slightly faster, TLC, too. The recently released Kingston NV3 with QLC has been coming down in price steadily, and is $125 at the moment, still too much, but I am quite certain that they can get much closer to $100, once they are willing to ramp the sales.