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 they also offer various memory cards and USB thumb drives.



Today, we are reviewing the Team Group T-Create Expert SSD, which is rated for an astonishing 12,000 TBW in the reviewed 2 TB version. Yeah, you read that right, twelve-thousand terabytes, or 12 Petabytes. On top of that, Team Group offers a 12 year warranty for the drive—an industry first, too. Please note that "T-Create" is a group of products, not the name of this product. There's also a T-Create "Classic", this review covers the T-Create "Expert".

Under the hood, the T-Create Expert uses a Silicon Motion SM2262ENG controller paired with 64-layer 3D TLC flash from Micron. Micron offers two variants of their flash chips "FortisFlash", which is for consumer applications and "FortisMax", for enterprise workloads. While FortisFlash is rated for 1500 program/erase cycles, FortisMax is rated for 10,000. I've confirmed that the T-Create Expert uses FortisFlash, and could imagine it has some firmware tweaks, too. As expected, DRAM is present, too, two chips are installed to provide 2 GB of storage for the mapping tables of the SSD.

The Team Group T-Create Expert comes in capacities of 1 TB ($400) and 2 TB ($800). Endurance for these models is set to 6000 TBW and 12000 TBW respectively. As mentioned before, Team Group includes a twelve-year warranty with the T-Create Expert.