The Team Group MP34Q is built by pairing 96-layer QLC flash from Intel/Micron with the Phison E12S controller—a combination we've seen on the Sabrent Rocket Q, Silicon Power UD70 and Corsair MP400 before. Actually, all these drives use the same Phison reference PCB design—the biggest difference seems to be that the Silicon Power UD70 uses 512 MB of DRAM cache, whereas the Rocket Q has 256 MB and the MP400 1 GB. The Team Group MP34Q in this review has 512 MB, too. Averaged over our real-life testing suite, the MP34Q achieves very decent performance that's comparable to most entry-level TLC SSDs, like the ADATA Falcon, Swordfish, and HP EX900 Pro. Compared to the Sabrent Rocket Q, the MP34Q is 5% faster, but it's 1% slower than the Corsair MP400. Samsung's highly popular 970 EVO is only 3% faster, the fastest PCIe Gen 3 SSDs are up to 12% faster, with differences reaching 15% with PCIe Gen 4. Compared to SATA SSDs, the performance uplift is around 15%, 40% if you compare against QLC SATA—definitely something you'll notice in everyday usage.

Synthetic numbers of the Team Group MP34Q confirm our findings; the drive's strongest suit is its high write performance, both in sequential and random IO, which is the backbone for the good real-life performance results. QLC flash improves the capacity by storing four bits of data per flash cell instead of three like TLC and two like MLC. While that obviously brings with it cost savings, the drawback is that writing to QLC is much slower than writing to TLC or MLC. In order to hide this performance penalty, all QLC-based SSDs operate some of their capacity in SLC mode, which is extremely fast to write to, but uses four times as much space. On the MP34Q, Team Group has configured the drive to use all capacity in SLC mode first, up to 500 GB—a quarter of the 2000 TB QLC capacity. Only then will the drive start flushing SLC to QLC with a significant performance loss—like all QLC SSDs. In our testing, we could write to SLC at 3 GB/s, but writing to QLC operated at only 250 MB/s. This is not as big a deal as it sounds right now and doesn't mean that once it's 25% full, you're only getting 250 MB/s writes. Our real-life testing happens with the SSD at 80% full, and we still got very decent performance out of the MP34Q.

There isn't much to report on the thermal testing side, other than that we couldn't get the drive to thermally throttle, which of course is a good result. It's also good to see that there is no risk of thermal throttling, no matter what you throw at the SSD despite the lack of a heatsink. In this market segment, a heatsink would just increase cost too much—consumer workloads can't drive up temperatures that much anyway.

With a retail price of $300, the Team Group MP34Q is really expensive even compared to TLC drives. I'm not sure how Team Group arrived at that price point. Competing drives, which are literally identical (Silicon Power UD70, $235), have more DRAM (Corsair MP400, $250), or are slightly slower (Sabrent Rocket Q, $250) are all much more affordable than the MP34Q. There's also strong competition from various TLC drives. For example, drives worth considering are the ADATA Swordfish for $200, ADATA SX8200 Pro for $220, HP EX950 for $250, and PCIe 4 XPG Gammix S70 for $270. Don't get me wrong, the MP34Q is a very capable SSD that's great for light consumer workloads and a huge upgrade over any HDD-based setup, but at the current price point, it's simply much too expensive. If Team Group could bring their pricing down significantly, to around $200, possibly below, it would suddenly become a tempting alternative to many 1 TB SSDs—just ~$50 spent to double your capacity with only a marginal performance hit in most workloads. Power users who write dozens of GB every single day should be looking at TLC SSDs, though, possibly PCIe Gen 4, at much higher pricing, of course.

Update Aug 21: The price on Amazon is down to $240 now. I added that price point to the performance/dollar chart. Now the drive is reasonably priced, for more discussion on competitors see the paragraph above.