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 controller and four flash chips, two DRAM cache chips are included, too.


The included heatsink is not preinstalled, which ensures easy installation of the drive in a laptop, where the heatsink won't fit.


Team Group's heatsink comes with a nice-looking design theme and a matte black paint job.


When taking a closer look it becomes apparent that there is a bit less metal than what you'd expect, it'll be interesting to see the results of our thermal testing.


The included thermal pad is a little bit too short. Make sure to cover the controller chip fully (on the left side of the picture), and let the NAND chip on the right slightly uncovered. Most of the heat is generated in the controller, so we want to prioritize cooling for it.

Chip Component Analysis

The Innogrit IG5236 was the company's first controller to support PCI-Express 4.0. It uses eight channels to maximize transfer rates and is fabricated on a 12 nm process at TSMC Taiwan.


The four flash chips are YMTC 128-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 512 GB.


Two Micron DDR4 chips provide 2 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.