Introduction

Team Group is a well-known Taiwanese memory and flash storage maker with a long history of catering to the needs of users from all over the globe. The Cardea Zero is based on the company's previous Cardea M.2 NVMe flash drive - the only difference between both is that the Cardea uses a red metal heatsink whereas the Cardea Zero uses a copper heatspreader.

As for the controller, Team Group opted for the Phison PS5007, which is a cost-effective solution. For flash, Team Group has picked Toshiba's 15 nm MLC NAND, which is long-term tested and readily available.

The Cardea Zero is available in capacities of 240 GB and 480 GB. Warranty is set to three years for these models.

Packaging and Contents

Inside the package, you will find just the SSD; no other accessories or documentation is included.

The Drive

The drive uses the M.2 2280 form factor, which means it is 22 mm wide and 80 mm long. On top of the SSD, you will find a thin metal heatspreader.


Like most M.2 NVMe SSDs, the Cardea Zero uses a PCIe x4 3.0 interface.


I ripped off the heatspreader, which is a triple-layer sandwich of some glue, graphene (according to Team Group), and a sheet of copper. By definition, graphene is a single atom-thick sheet of carbon, which means it shouldn't really be visible to the naked eye. To me, the material looks more like graphite. Nevertheless, the thin heatspreader ensures you won't have mounting issues due to a big heatsink, like some people reported with the regular Cardea.


You will find the SSD controller and four flash chips on the PCB. A DRAM chip is also present to provide the SSD controller with RAM and soak up write bursts.


The Phison PS5007 is an 8-channel PCIe SSD controller.


The four MLC flash chips are made by Toshiba on a 15 nanometer production process.

Test Setup