When I first saw Team Group's Delta Max RGB SSD at Computex 2019, I was stunned at how smooth and perfect the lighting effects looked, almost like they put an LCD screen on top of the SSD. What also makes things convenient is that the Delta Max hooks into your motherboard's ARGB output, so you can synchronize it with the lighting effects of the rest of your system. Each of the 20 LEDs can be controlled individually, both in color and brightness. Team Group did a great job achieving such nice lighting with only 20 LEDs, which not only helps limit power consumption, but also keeps drive temperatures at decent levels—the drive was barely hand-warm during all our testing.

In order to control the RGB LEDs, you have to connect an additional cable to your SSD, from the motherboard's 5-pin ARGB header. If you don't connect the cable, the SSD will work perfectly fine, but the lighting remains off, which is good if you prefer to turn off the lights. Unfortunately, that additional cable adds a bit to the bulk in your case. ADATA's Spectrix S40G, for example, transfers all its RGB data over the M.2 slot interface, so an additional cable is not required. ADATA also supplies their own software for RGB control, so you can use it if your motherboard lacks RGB support. On the Delta Max RGB, you can connect a power-only cable and the SSD will light up in a static, predefined pattern, which looks great, but isn't controllable.

In terms of performance the Delta Max does fine, slotting in just a few percentage points behind the fastest 2.5" SATA SSDs, but the differences are small. Under the hood, it is powered by an SMI 2258G controller paired with Samsung 48-layer 3D TLC flash and 1 GB of DRAM. While the SLC cache might seem small at first with just 10 GB for a 1 TB drive, it is actually sufficient as the drive barely sees a loss in performance when writing more than those 10 GB in one go. With a sustained write speed of 428 MB/s, it is actually one of the best SATA drives in that test. M.2 NVMe SSDs are a good deal faster, though, and their pricing is coming down rapidly, too.

With a price of $150 for the tested 1 TB version, the Delta Max RGB is certainly not cheap. You can find SSDs with similar performance for a third less, but they lack the adjustable RGB functionality of the Delta Max. Actually, I'm only aware of three 2.5" SATA RGB SSDs, the Team Group T-Force Delta RGB, Kingston HyperX Fury RGB, and Delta Max RGB, and the lighting quality of the Delta Max RGB is the best of those by far. If M.2 is an option, too, the ADATA S40G 1 TB retails for the same $150 with better performance. But if you absolutely must have a 2.5" RGB SSD to show off in your casemod build, then options are limited, and I'd recommend the Delta Max despite its high pricing.