With the T-Create Expert, Team Group is making a big leap forward for warranty lengths on solid-state-drives. While we've traditionally seen three years, and five years was considered "a lot," Team Group goes much further than that and offers 12 years of warranty on the T-Create Expert. Just to clarify, especially if you're using Amazon's terrible search engine, there's also the T-Create "Classic," which is a different SSD than the one tested today. Today, we tested T-Create "Expert" with its unique selling points the "12 year warranty" and "12,000 TBW" endurance. That endurance is higher than nearly all consumer SSDs out there and rivals even some enterprise SSDs. So what is Team Group's secret sauce? It's the flash chips. Micron sells their NAND flash in two variants "FortisFlash" and "FortisMax". While FortisFlash is designed for consumers, with 1500 program/erase cycles, FortisMax is guaranteed by Micron to withstand 10,000 P/E cycles. From what I understand both these variants are based on the exact same silicon, using the same dies, so I'm not sure what the actual technical difference is. Beyond that, the T-Create Expert is built using a Silicon Motion SM2262ENG controller, except for the flash chip rating, the exact same configuration as we've seen on the HP EX950 and ADATA SX8200 Pro—two famous high-end drives that are always near the top of our leaderboards, as fast as it gets when using the PCIe 3.0 interface.

Our real-life testing confirms that the T-Create Expert is among the fastest SSDs we ever tested. It matches the HP EX950 exactly, just 1–2% behind the Kingston KC2000, WD Black 2018, and ADATA SX8200 Pro. The performance difference to the latest PCIe Gen 4 SSDs isn't big either, only 6% and 7% compared to the Samsung 980 Pro and WD Black SN 850 respectively. Compared to lower-end NVMe SSDs, the lead is around 14%, and SATA-based SSDs are 20% slower, up to 40% if you compare against SATA QLC.

Team Group gave the T-Create Expert a large pseudo-SLC cache. With 304 GB, it is able to soak up nearly all bursts in write activity. Filling the whole drive completes at 1.2 GB/s on average, which is a very good result. When the cache is empty, writes are processed at over 2.5 GB/s until the SLC cache has been exhausted. When the SLC cache is full, writes still run at almost 1 GB/s, which is sufficient for nearly all scenarios. Of course, momentarily stopping the write activity has the SLC cache free up capacity immediately, so full write rates are available as soon as you give the drive a moment to settle down.

It's great to see a preinstalled heatspreader on the T-Create Expert, and it looks fantastic, too. Team Group definitely hit that clean industrial design sweet spot associated with the "Creators" mindset. Our thermal testing shows that there's still some thermal throttling in our worst-case thermal test. It's not because the heatsink isn't effective, but because Team Group set a very conservative thermal limit for the drive. We've seen similar SSDs throttle once they reach 90°C, but the T-Create Expert will throttle at around 75°C. Maybe such a limit helps improve the drive's longevity, to ensure the 12-year warranty claim can be reached, not sure.

The Team Group T-Create Expert 2 TB is currently listed for $800, and the 1 TB version for $400. That pricing is way too high, more expensive than many real enterprise SSDs. For comparison, the WD Black SN850 2 TB, the fastest SSD we ever tested, is $380—half of Team Group's asking price. The Samsung 980 Pro 2 TB is similarly priced. Now, of course neither of those drives offers 12,000 TBW or a 12-year warranty. I'm still not sure if this is a good deal. Even if you use the 12-year warranty two or three times, you're not making your money back compared to buying a more affordable SSD and replacing it over the years. What makes the big difference is that flash prices are always going down. In 2015, a 1 TB SSD would cost you $500, it's a fifth of that now. Looking at it another way, we'll be buying 4 TB SSDs in five years—1 TB drives will be as useless as a 250 GB SSD today.

You also have to put 12,000 TBW into perspective. The T-Create Expert can write at a sustained 1 GB/s, that's 86.4 TB per day—it simply cannot go faster. In order to use up 12,000 TBW, you'd have to run the drive at full speed for 138 days without pause. Now, no such scenario exists because where do you find all that data? Once it is full (after half an hour), do you just erase 2 TB of data and fill the drive again completely? Even if you use this drive for the heaviest of tasks, like video recording and editing, it'll be impossible to reach the TBW rating, same as any other half decent SSD. Most SSDs can have their lifetime writes read via software, do take a look on yours, you'll be surprised.

So Team Group is basically taking an additional $500 from you to give you that warm fuzzy feeling of having a solid-state-drive that will never break. There is no such guarantee; best case you get a replacement drive when it breaks. Your data will still be gone—backups are important. The T-Create Expert does use enterprise-level TLC, so the TBW rating could be realistic, but it's highly unlikely you'll ever get close to it. Don't get me wrong, the T-Create Expert is a great SSD, only problem is that it's priced terribly. I would say a reasonable price for the T-Create Expert is around $300, at which point I'd be personally willing to spend the $60 (or +30%) over competing drives for the better warranty.