The Team Group Cardea IOPS addresses one of the biggest fears of SSD users—overheating. It does this by including not one, but two heatsink options in the package. Actually, there are three options because you can run the uncooled drive, too, of course. Personally, I think there is little reason to worry about thermal throttling on any half-decent SSD. The reason is that our typical consumer workloads are not nearly intense enough to drive temperatures high enough for throttling to engage. Now of course, it is possible that you hammer the SSD all day with incoming data, which is what our thermal testing simulates—a worst-case scenario.

Even when uncooled, the Cardea IOPS performs admirably. There's a tiny bit of thermal throttling after three minutes of writing 3 GB each second—from 3 GB/s to 2.7 GB/s. Once we installed the Graphene heatspreader, this throttling disappeared because the temperature dropped by around 10°C. I have to say I'm really impressed by this result. I honestly thought the heatspreader wouldn't do much, but apparently just spreading out the heat over an area that's six times bigger or so makes a big difference. Technically, the "Graphene" is not Graphene, but a copper foil that's painted black—still, it does its job just fine.

While the Graphene heatspreader will be useful for laptops, where you have very little height to work with, the classic heatsink included in the package is better suited for desktop PCs. Once we installed it, temperatures dropped by another 10°C over the heatspreader, which brings the total improvement to 20°C—excellent. The heatsink is a very decent design, made of metal, with a good mounting mechanism, no complaints here.

What we also can't complain about is real-life performance, which is able to compete with the best PCI-Express Gen 3 SSDs, like the HP EX950, Kingston KC2000, and ADATA SX8200 Pro. In recent months, we've seen the release of real PCIe Gen 4 SSDs, like the Samsung 980 Pro, WD Black SN850, and Corsair MP600 Pro. These drives are still 5%–7% faster on average, but much more expensive, too.

A major con of the Team Group Cardea IOPS is the SLC cache of just 22 GB, which can be considered small by today's standards. Large bursts in write activity can fill this cache in just a few seconds. Once the SLC cache is full, the drive has to juggle flushing the cache and handling incoming writes, which results in a sustained write speed of 1.2 GB/s—still pretty good. You also have to put 22 GB in perspective. Nearly all everyday write bursts are smaller, so unless you're a power user, you might never exhaust that SLC cache. Of course, momentarily stopping the write activity has the SLC cache free up capacity immediately, so full write rates are available as soon as you give the drive a moment to settle down.

Team Group's Cardea IOPS SSD currently retails for $150, which is a little bit on the high side. Competing drives can be found for around $120. While I have to admit that many of those don't come with a heatsink, an additional heatsink doesn't cost $30. Once the price of the Cardea IOPS reaches $130 or so, I'd say it's definitely an option to consider, also because the dual-heatsink design offers additional flexibility for when you install it in a laptop or desktop PC.