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're looking at the Team Group T-Force M200 portable SSD, which uses a design inspired by ammo cartridges. It still looks sleek enough to make it onto a corporate desk. The M200 utilizes the blazing-fast USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 20 Gbps interface, which doubles transfer rates over USB 3.2 Gen 2x1, aka USB 3.1 Gen 2. Many portable SSDs using USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 were bottlenecked by the USB interface speed, which has taking interface transfer rates to the next level make sense. At this time, only seven AMD AM4 motherboards natively support the 20 Gbps USB interface; on Intel, there's much better availability: about 50 motherboards exist for LGA1700, and 70 for the LGA1200 platform. For all our testing, we used a Gigabyte GC-USB 3.2 Gen2x2 PCI-Express x4 add-in card, so we can properly max out Team Group's new portable SSD.

Internally, the T-Force M200 uses a full-size M.2 NVMe SSD with the Phison E16 controller and Micron QLC flash, paired with an ASMedia ASM2364 USB bridge. A DRAM cache chip is included, too.

We review the Team Group T-Force M200 in the 2 TB variant, which is actually the smallest capacity. It's also available in 4 TB and 8 TB. The warranty is set to five years for all these models.

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.