The TeamGroup T-Force Cardea A440 Pro Special Series ($359.99 for 2TB as tested) is the latest of several M.2 internal solid-state drives we have reviewed that boast PlayStation 5 compatibility as a key selling point. Indeed, it meets Sony’s requirements for use with a PS5 console as well as working with a desktop or laptop, though the latter two will need PCI Express 4.0 support to make the most of the SSD’s performance. That performance proved good in most of our benchmarks, though it fell short of its rated sequential read and write speeds. The Special Series doesn’t unseat the Editors’ Choice award-winning ADATA XPG Gammix S70 Blade, but it’s competitively priced and worth consideration.
Primed for the PS5
The Cardea A440 Pro Special Series is an M.2 SSD marketed mostly for its PS5 friendliness—even its label spells out Pro Special 5eries. While some M.2 drives promoted as PS5-compatible, such as the WD Black SN850 NVMe SSD, include heat shields that make them taller and fit into the console rather snugly, the T-Force does so with plenty of room to spare (just over 5mm, based on figures provided by TeamGroup).
The A440 Pro Special Series is an internal SSD comprising 96-layer triple-level-cell (TLC) 3D NAND flash. It’s built around a Phison E18 controller and uses the NVMe 1.4 protocol over its four-lane PCI Express 4.0 bus. The drive’s M.2 Type-2280 (80mm long) “gumstick” format is standard fare for late-model internal SSDs. (New to some of this lingo? Check out our glossary of SSD terms.)
Available in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities, the Special Series is aggressively priced compared with its peers. Among other PS5-compatible drives we’ve reviewed, the ADATA S70 Blade sells for 20 cents per gigabyte in both 1TB and 2TB flavors while the WD Black SN850 goes for 25 cents per gig for 1TB and 22 cents for the 2TB model.
Along with the Special Series, there are two other drives in the Cardea A440 Pro stable. A similar model, also employing a graphene heat spreader, sells for $169.99 for 1TB, $359.99 for 2TB, and $909.99 for 4TB, while a version with an aluminum heatsink too big for the PlayStation 5’s SSD installation niche lists for $179.99, $369, and $919.99 in the same relative capacities. (The original TeamGroup T-Force Cardea A440, which includes both a graphene heat spreader and a larger aluminum heatsink, lists for 23 cents per gigabyte for its 1TB model and 24 cents per gig for 2TB.)
A drive’s durability is measured in terabytes written (TBW), a manufacturer’s estimate of how much data can be written to a drive over its lifetime before some cells begin to fail and get taken out of service. TBW tends to scale 1:1 with capacity, as is the case with the A440 Pro Special Series. Its ratings of 700TBW for 1TB and 1,400TBW for the 2TB version we tested are in the middle of the range for drives based on TLC memory. The Kingston KC3000 is rated at 800TB for its 1TB stick and 1,600TBW for the 2TB model, and the Gammix S70 Blade’s ratings are 740TBW for 1TB and 1,480TBW for 2TB. The Corsair Force Series MP600 and the Silicon Power US70 top them all, durability-wise, with ratings of 1,800TBW for 1TB and 3,600TBW for 2TB.
TeamGroup’s warranty for the drive is good for five years or until you hit the rated TBW figure in writes, whichever comes first. Unless you write massive amounts of data to the SSD, the warranty should expire before you reach the TBW limit.
Testing the Cardea A440 Pro Special Series: Solid Scores Under PCI Express 4.0
We test all of our PCI Express 4.0 SSDs on a desktop PC with an MSI Godlike X570 motherboard and AMD Ryzen 9 3950X CPU. The testbed has 16GB of Corsair Dominator DDR4 memory clocked to 3,600MHz and employs an Nvidia GeForce graphics card for display output.
We put the A440 Pro Special Series through our usual suite of internal solid-state drive benchmarks, comprising Crystal DiskMark 6.0, PCMark 10 Storage, and AS-SSD. Crystal DiskMark’s sequential speed tests provide a traditional measure of drive throughput, simulating best-case, straight-line transfers of large files.
In our Crystal DiskMark sequential speed testing, the A440 Pro Special Series’ write and especially read speeds were considerably lower than its ratings, though the drive is still quite fast—say, in the second tier of the elite PCIe 4.0 drives we compared it to. Its 4K read speeds were relatively low, while its 4K writes were above average. In AS-SSD copy testing, its ISO speed score was about average, and its program and game loading speeds were on the low side.
As a group, recent high-end PCI Express 4.0 M.2 drives have done very well in the PCMark 10 benchmark, which measures a drive’s speed in performing a variety of everyday tasks from copying folders to loading files, games, creative apps, and the Windows 10 operating system. The A440 Pro Special Series’ PCMark 10 overall score was impressive, but only midrange among these SSD speedsters. It was one of four drives with similar results at the top of the class in the Windows 10 boot test. Its other PCMark 10 program loading scores, as well as its ISO and file copy results, were more or less average.
A Value-Priced M.2 Drive for PS5 or PC
The Cardea A440 Pro Special Series’ far-from-secret weapon is that it easily meets Sony’s qualifications for M.2 drives that work with the PlayStation 5, sliding into the console with room to spare thanks to its thin graphene heat spreader. Its performance numbers were solid, with a good PCMark 10 overall score demonstrating its speed in program loading and other tasks. While its Crystal DiskMark sequential read and write scores, a measure of a drive’s raw throughput, fell short of its rated speeds, they still put it among the faster PCI Express 4.0 SSDs we’ve tested.
The two other explicitly PS5-friendly drives we’ve reviewed, the ADATA S70 Blade and WD Black SN850, also had very good overall performance in our benchmarks. Unlike the T-Force SSD, they both effectively matched or exceeded their sequential speed ratings as measured by Crystal DiskMark, becoming our first two drives with read scores above 7,000MBps. The Editors’ Choice-winning S70 Blade, which holds our record-high sequential read and write scores, also adds goodies like a strong software suite and 256-bit AES hardware-based encryption, so it remains our first pick. But the A440 Pro Special Series is a highly capable drive at a slightly lower price.
