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.



While nearly all the interest today is for M.2 NVMe drives, there's still hundreds of millions of SATA drives out there and a lot of older computers don't support M.2, or your M.2 slots are already full. For a lot of workloads the performance offered by SATA SSDs is also enough, so why spend more on an M.2 SSD?

That's why we're testing the Team Group T-FORCE Vulcan Z 2 TB SSD today. It comes at an amazing $140 price points, which comes down to $70 per TB, making it one of the most affordable drives on the market. Under the hood, the Vulcan Z uses a Silicon Motion SM2259 XT controller paired with Hynix 128-layer 3D TLC NAND flash. Given the entry-level positioning and low price, a DRAM cache chip is not included for cost reasons.

The Team Group T-Force Vulcan Z comes in capacities of 240 GB ($18) / 256 GB ($19), 480 GB ($30) / 512 GB ($30), 1 TB ($60) and 2 TB ($120). Endurance for these models is set to 200 TBW, 200 TBW, 400 TBW, 400 TBW, 800 TBW and 1600 TBW respectively. Team Group includes a three-year warranty with the Vulcan Z SSD.

Packaging

The Drive

The drive conforms to the dimensions set forth by the 2.5" form factor. It is made out of plastic and only 7 mm thick, which makes it compatible with Intel's Ultrabook specification.


The Team Group Vulcan Z uses the SATA 6 Gbps interface. It is compatible with any older SATA standard, but will in such a case work at reduced performance.


On the PCB, you'll find the controller and two flash chips, a DRAM cache chip is not available.

Chip Component Analysis

The Silicon Motion SM2259XT G is an older SATA SSD controller. It supports four flash channels and is optimized for DRAM-less operation.


The two flash chips are Hynix 128-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 1 TB.