Packaging and Contents

The Drive

The drive uses the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


Like most M.2 NVMe SSDs, the Team Group Cardea II connects to the host system over a PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface.


Unlike nearly all other M.2 SSDs on the market, Team Group has preinstalled a pretty solid heatsink on their drive. What's good, especially for users who might end up using the drive in their notebook further down the road, is that the heatsink can be removed fairly easily (it's not glued on).


On the PCB, you'll find four flash chips, the controller, and two DRAM chips.


The 8-channel flash controller is made by Phison, with their latest model with support for 3D TLC, QLC, and PCI-Express 3.0 x4. It uses eight flash channels and is produced on a 28 nm process at TSMC Taiwan.


The four TLC flash chips are made by Toshiba, built using 64-layers on a 15 nanometer 3D NAND production process.


Two SKhynix DDR4-2400 chips provide a total of 1 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables in.