Package

The Drive

The M200 is relatively large for a portable SSD, roughly the size of a portable HDD.


The top part of the outer shell is made out of plastic, while the bottom is made out of metal. The overall design looks a bit industrial, yet clean enough to look good on your work desk.

Team Group advertises the M200 as "2-meter drop resistant," but clarifies that this means "up to 2 meter without impact on data or drive on a carpeted floor. However, it is not guaranteed that the SSD, appearance, and data will not be damaged in all environments. Do not drop or damage the product at will." To me, this basically means you can drop it, but might break it, which is not very useful.


A single USB-C port lets you connect to the drive. An activity indicator is not available.

Disassembly

The drive uses a clipping mechanism to hold the two sides together. Opening the SSD without breaking the little clips or leaving marks on the plastic will almost be impossible. Inside, you'll find two major components, a standard-sized M.2 NVMe SSD and converter board that translates between the USB signals and NVMe interface.


The USB-to-NVMe PCB has the USB-C connector and USB host bridge chip.


As the bridge chip, an ASMedia AS2364 is used; it supports PCI-Express 3.0 x4 SSDs with NVMe 1.2.1.


The NVMe drive seems to be identical to the Team Group Cardea Zero Z44Q, which we reviewed last year.


As flash chips, 96-layer 3D QLC chips from Micron are used. The part number is IA7HG66AWA, which decodes to MT29F1T08GBLBE3W.


Two Hynix DDR4-2666 chips provide 2 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.


The PS5016-E16 from Phison was one of the first controllers with support for PCI-Express 4.0. The ASMedia bridge chip only supports Gen 3, though, so the whole drive will run in PCIe 3.0 mode, which isn't a problem because USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 can't go faster than 20 Gbps anyway.