Technology & Positioning
The Team Group G50 SSD is a value-optimized SSD that comes at extremely competitive pricing. It uses the Innogrit IG5220 controller, which has been on the market for three years now, but that doesn't have to be a bad thing. At this point in the lifetime of a controller design you can be certain that all issues have been found and that it will keep your data safe for many years. I also suspect that Team Group got a pretty good price on the controller, possibly because it's nearing end-of-life—which is good for you—cheaper SSDs! The NAND flash chips are YMTC's 128-layer 3D TLC—nothing new or fancy either, but it certainly does the job, and it beats the QLC that we've been seeing on more and more recent value drives. As expected for a value drive, there is no DRAM cache, but the controller will use up to 64 MB of the system's memory for the mapping stables.

Synthetic Performance
Synthetic performance results of the Team Group G50 end up roughly in the middle of our test group, which is "not bad" for a value drive. In sequential reads we got up to 4.5 GB/s and writes topped out at 4.1 GB/s. With a more realistic queue depth you're still getting over 2.5 GB/s, which is still pretty fast.

Real-Life Performance
Controller vendors have been optimizing their controllers for typical synthetic reviewer workloads on an empty drive. That's why it's important to also include real-life testing. We're even running those tests with the drives filled to 85% capacity, not empty. This approach puts additional strain on the various algorithms and the SLC cache, just like in real-life. Here Team Group's G50 does a bit better than in the synthetic tests and manages to beat Kingston's newest value drive by 1%, while being more affordable at the same time. The G50 is also faster than the Samsung 970 Evo, and is just 3% behind the 980 Pro. The best value drives like the MAP1602-based Lexar NM790 do achieve considerably better performance, just like the WD SN770 and SN580. Still, the G50 definitely achieves its design objective—"fast enough at amazing pricing." Compared to older M.2 NVMe drives, there's a definite performance improvement and the gap to older SATA drives is quite big, too. We do have an Innogrit IG5220 drive in our test group—the ADATA XPG Atom 50. The Team Group G50 is an impressive 5% faster, despite a similar hardware configuration, I suspect that Innogrit has optimized the firmware quite a lot over the years, maybe the TLC from YMTC helps a bit, too.

SLC Cache / Sustained Performance
The Team Group G50 uses an SLC cache size of 626 GB (or 92% in SLC mode), the drive can absorb nearly all bursts of write activity. Once the SLC cache is exhausted, transfer rates drop quite a bit and reach around 500 MB/s. Filling the whole 2 TB capacity completed at 631 MB/s, which is in line with other well-priced SSD offerings. Thanks to the use of TLC, the transfer rates are much higher than on competing QLC drives, which often slow to 200 MB/s or less when their cache is full. The fastest value-SSDs based on MAP1602 + TLC, like the Lexar NM790, are considerably faster in this test though, reaching well over 1.4 GB/s. For the vast majority of users, like your parents, that focus on Internet browsing, Office productivity and video playback, this will be a total non-issue though.

Power Consumption / Heat
Since it's based on an older controller design that's fabricated using a 14 nanometer design, you shouldn't expect miracles from energy efficiency. Modern controllers do much better here, but for a desktop PC that sees typical consumer usage this won't be an issue at all. I probably wouldn't recommend the drive for a laptop, because it doesn't reach its lowest ASPM power state—other drives consume MUCH less power in this scenario, giving you better battery life. For a desktop, 1 W more or less won't make any difference. While the drive's heat output isn't crazy high, it's still recommended to install the included heat spreader or a bigger heatsink, especially when you plan on putting the drive to heavy use. Our testing confirms that the heat spreader does have a good effect on temperatures, helping prolong the time to throttling significantly.

Pricing & Alternatives
The Team Group G50 2 TB is currently listed online for $105, which makes it one of the most affordable M.2 NVMe Gen 4 drives on the market. At that price point it offers fantastic price/performance that's hard to beat. No doubt, just a year ago SSD prices were much lower, with 2 TB drives reaching $100, but times have changed and prices have gone up considerably. Strong competition comes from MAP1602 drives such as the Lexar NM790. Considering that the latter currently sells for $135, a price point of $105 for the G50 will definitely make me think twice about which drive I prefer. No doubt, the MAP1602 is a fantastic controller, but is it worth an extra $30 for a few percent in performance that you'd likely never notice? On the other hand, $30 isn't much in absolute terms, especially when building a new PC. If you want a drive that "fast enough," I can definitely recommend the Team Group G50. Other notable alternatives are the WD SN580 ($100) and WD SN770 ($120), both slightly faster, TLC, too. The recently released Kingston NV3 with QLC has been coming down in price steadily, and is $125 at the moment, still too much, but I am quite certain that they can get much closer to $100, once they are willing to ramp the sales.