Introduction

Team Group is a well-known Taiwanese hardware manufacturer with a long history of catering to the needs of enthusiasts and gamers from all over the globe. Their lineup includes DRAM memory and solid-state drives, and Team Group also offer various memory cards and USB thumb drives.



The MP44Q from Team Group is designed to be cost-effective. To achieve that, it uses the Maxiotech MAP1602 controller, which has been delivering outstanding performance at great pricing in well known drives like the Lexar NM790. Unlike the NM790, which uses YMTC TLC NAND flash, the Team Group MP44Q comes with YMTC QLC flash, in the 232-layer variant. This gives Team Group an additional cost advantage vs using TLC. As expected for a value-oriented SSD, a DRAM cache chip is not available, but the SSD will use up to 40 MB of system memory through the HMB (Host-Memory-Buffer) mechanism.

The Team Group MP44Q is available in capacities of 1 TB ($60), 2 TB ($120) and 4 TB ($235). The endurance is set to 512 TBW, 1024 TBW, and 2048 TBW respectively. Team Group includes a five-year warranty with the MP44Q SSD.

Packaging

The Drive

The drive is designed for the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


PCI-Express 4.0 x4 is used as the host interface to the rest of the system, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth compared to PCIe 3.0 x4.


On the PCB you'll find the SSD controller and four flash chips. A DRAM cache is not available.


As heat spreader Team Group is using the sticker. It is somewhat metallic with a gray substance at the back, which according to Team Group is Graphene, but it could also be graphite based on the looks. The sticker is somewhat stiff, but not as stiff as heatspreaders with a copper core. Please also note that the heat spreader is rather thin.

Chip Component Analysis

MaxioTech's MAP1602A controller is produced on TSMC's 12 nanometer node and uses several Arm Cortex R5 CPU cores.


The four flash chips are YMTC 232-layer 3D QLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 512 GB.

Test Setup

Synthetic Testing

• Tests are run with a 20-second-long warm-up time (result recording starts at second 21).
• Between each test, the drive is left idle for 60 seconds, to allow it to flush and reorganize its internal data.
• All write requests contain random, incompressible data.
• Disk cache is flushed between all tests.
• During these tests, M.2 drives are tested with additional active fan-cooling, to ensure thermal throttling can't happen

Real-life Testing

• After initial configuration and installation, a disk image is created; it is used to test every drive.
• Automated updates are disabled for the OS and all programs. This ensures that—for every review—each drive uses the same settings, without interference from previous testing.
• Our disk image consumes around 700 GB—partitions are resized to fill all available space on the drive.
• All drives are filled with random data to 85% of their capacity. This is intentional, to run the drive in realistic operating conditions—nobody uses a nearly-empty SSD in their system. It also puts additional stress on the pseudo-SLC cache subsystem, because there is less free NAND space to work with.
• Partitions are aligned properly.
• Disk cache is flushed between all tests.
• In order to minimize random variation, each real-life performance test is run several times, with reboots between tests to minimize the impact of disk cache.
• All application benchmarks run the actual application and do not replay any disk traces.
• Our real-life testing data includes performance numbers for a typical high-performance HDD, using results from a Western Digital WD Black 1 TB 7200 RPM 3.5" SATA. HDDs are significantly slower than SSDs, which is why we're not putting the result in the chart, as that would break the scaling, making the SSDs indistinguishable in comparison. Instead, we've added the HDD performance numbers in the title of each test entry.
• During these tests, M.2 drives are tested with additional active fan-cooling, to ensure thermal throttling can't happen