Technology & Positioning
Finally! A new PCI-Express Gen 5 SSD controller is available for consumer solid-state-drives. The Team Group GE Pro is built using Innogrit's new IG5666 controller, paired with 2 TB of YMTC 232-layer TLD NAND flash and a DRAM cache chip from Micron. For a whole year, Phison's E26 SSD controller was the only option to build a Gen 5 SSD. Virtually every Gen 5 SSD on the market has been based on the same hardware combo, using the same PCB design and firmware. With the Team Group GE Pro we finally have an alternative to consider, which should also put pricing pressure on Phison. While Phison started with 10 GB/s drives first and then upped the transfer rates to 12 GB/s and 14 GB/s as faster NAND chips became available, Innogrit starts out with 14 GB/s right away, thanks to flash running at 2400 MT/s.

Synthetic Performance
Synthetic performance results of the Team Group GE Pro are highly impressive when it comes to 4K random IO. In this group of tests, the drive is the fastest that we've ever tested. It's the first one that reaches over 100 MB/s at 4K Read QD1, which is one of the most important tests for an SSD, because it represents the vast majority of real-life transfers on consumer systems today. Sequential transfer rates are quite a bit lower than on the Phison E26 powered Corsair MP700 Pro. Especially 1M Sequential Read at QD1 can't impress, reaching just eighth place, with 4.6 GB/s. For higher queue depths the drive does indeed achieve transfer rates of 10 GB/s+ for both read and write.

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 the Team Group GE Pro does well, but ends up a few percentage points behind the Corsair MP700 Pro. It roughly reaches the same performance levels as the best PCIe Gen 4 drives like the Samsung 990 Pro, Crucial T500, Solidigm P44 Pro and Lexar NM790. Even the aging Kingston KC3000 is only 1% behind. To be honest, that is a bit disappointing, I expected more. Team Group tells us that they are actively working on the firmware for their IG5666 drives, so this might improve over time. Looking at our test results, we can clearly see that write-heavy workloads do quite well on the GE Pro, but read-heavy scenarios are just near the top, intermixed with the best Gen 4 drives. Of course that doesn't mean that the GE Pro is "slow"—quite the opposite, it blazed through all our workloads, but given the Gen 5 marketing I expected more.

SLC Cache / Sustained Performance
Team Group's drive comes with an SLC cache size of 600 GB (or 90% in SLC mode), which is enough to soak up nearly all bursts of write activity. Once the SLC cache is exhausted, transfer rates still reach a respectable 2 GB/s. Filling the whole 2 TB capacity completed at a very good 2.2 GB/s, which is faster than nearly all Gen 4 SSDs, but still a few hundred MB/s behind the Corsair MP700 Pro, which reaches 2.8 GB/s in the same test.

Power Consumption / Heat
For a Gen 5 controller, power consumption is very important, because it directly influences the heat output of the whole drive. Unfortunately Team Group doesn't bundle a heatsink with the GE Pro—users are expected to bring their own, so we couldn't do thermal testing comparably. Our power consumption tests reveal though that the IG5666 is consuming a lot of power, more than the Phison E26. While we've all been complaining about high idle power consumption on the Phison E26, the IG5666 is on a completely different levels. Sitting idle, doing nothing, the drive consumes 4 W! This is more than many M.2 NVMe drives at full load. When tested with PCIe ASPM power savings enabled, like in a laptop, it still draws 1.9 W, suggesting that it can't reach its lower power states in a mobile scenario. Interestingly, the drive reports its own, expected, power usage as 0.02 W and 0.15 W in idle, and no higher than 3.5 W under load—these are all wrong—guess someone copied the table from a Gen 4 drive and forgot to update it. When fully loaded, the drive hits 15 W—another record. Innogrit definitely has some work to do to reduce all these values.

Pricing & Alternatives
The Team Group GE Pro 2 TB is currently listed online for $260, which is comparable to 2 TB drives using the Phison E26 controller, which sit in a fairly wide price range between $200 and $280. Given the results in this review, I find it impossible to recommend the GE Pro at this pricing. If the price reaches less than $200 it could become an interesting alternative to Phison-powered drives, or a lot of firmware improvements must be found. Strong competition comes from the best PCIe Gen 4 drives, which are just as fast, at much lower pricing. My top candidates here are Lexar NM790 ($135), Samsung 990 Pro ($170), Crucial T500 ($145), Solidigm P44 Pro ($140), which are all cheaper and not that much slower. If you are shopping not only for performance, but also for value, then you should definitely consider the WD SN770 ($120), too.