Team Group has engineered a great NVMe PCIe SSD with the Cardea Zero that doesn't break the bank and offers excellent performance. Important circuitry on the M.2 2280 board is a Phison controller and four Toshiba MLC flash chips, which, when heavily loaded, don't suffer from the write hole TLC exhibits. I find the choice of 15 nm MLC flash surprising considering all the rage is TLC and supply of these MLC chips is probably gonna run out soon. So, if you trust MLC more than TLC, which is in my opinion a thing of the past, the Cardea Zero should definitely be on your shopping list.

In our real-life testing, we see excellent performance that, when averaged, makes it the fastest M.2 NVMe drive we have tested so far, but the differences aren't that big. The much more expensive Samsung 950 Pro doesn't do so well in the ISO file copy and MS Office installation tests, but shines in other IO workloads where the Cardea Zero's Phison controller falls behind a bit due to higher IO latency (refer to the synthetic latency testing). One thing has to be clear though: NVMe doesn't magically make your disk IO infinitely fast. Modern 2.5" SATA drives are already very fast, shifting the performance bottleneck away from storage and towards CPU and software algorithms. NVMe can just shift that a little bit more without showing the huge gains we all experienced when switching from HDD to SSD.

Our thermal testing reveals that the drive can easily cope with heavy writes without cooling, but at some point, after 150 GB written in less than two minutes, it will start throttling to keep drive temperatures sane. Unlike other drives, which sometimes end up with SATA SSD speeds, the write speeds on the Cardea Zero are still kept very high, at around 750 MB/s. Team Group is making big claims with the heatsink, which is "superconducting" and "graphene", both of which I doubt. Still, the heatsink does its job and is more compact than the metal heatsink on the Cardea non-Zero.

Price-wise, the Cardea Zero clocks in at an extremely reasonable $130 for the tested 240 GB version, which makes it one of the more affordable PCIe SSDs on the market. Most of the cheaper models are using the much slower M.2 SATA interface recognizable by the two notches on the connector.