In the tradition of solid-state drives based on QLC NAND memory, TeamGroup’s T-Force Cardea Zero Z44Q (starts at $269.99 for 2TB as tested; $599.99 for 4TB) offers high capacity and good value for its price, but low write-life durability and unremarkable speed scores. Like some other TeamGroup drives, the Z44Q includes twin heat-dissipation solutions for laptops and desktops. In our tests, it nearly matched its rated sequential-read and -write speeds, and it delivered good 4K read results. But otherwise, its test results tended to trail the pack for its class of SSD. It’s best as an entry-level value proposition—the 4TB model gives you greater capacity, while the 2TB drive is more cost-effective
A QLC Drive, Through and Through
The Z44Q is a four-lane PCI Express (PCIe) 4.0 drive, based on Micron 96-layer QLC 3D NAND flash memory and featuring a Phison E16 controller. It is built in the M.2 Type-2280 “gumstick” form factor common among modern internal SSDs. It employs the NVMe 1.4 protocol over its PCIe 4.0 bus. (Baffled by some of these terms? Check out our handy SSD dejargonizer.)
At $269.99, or 13 cents per gigabyte, for its 2TB version and $599.99 (15 cents per gig) for the 4TB unit, the Z44Q is modestly priced for a PCI Express 4.0 M.2 SSD, though in line with other QLC-based PCIe 4.0 SSDs. For example, the 2TB Mushkin Delta currently sells for 12 cents per gigabyte, and its 4TB version for 14 cents a gig. The 2TB Sabrent Rocket Q4 sells for 15 cents a gigabyte, and its 4TB version goes for 17 cents per gig.
Another characteristic that the Z44Q shares with other QLC drives is its low durability rating, as measured in terabytes written (TBW). The 2TB Z44Q is rated at 400TBW and the 4TB capacity at 800TBW, ratings it shares with the Mushkin Delta and Sabrent Rocket Q4. At the other extreme are some highly durable drives that use TLC NAND flash, including the MSI Spatium M470 (3,300TBW for its 2TB version), and the Corsair Force Series MP600 and the Silicon Power US70, each rated at 1,800TBW for 1TB and 3,600TBW for 2TB.
Terabytes written is an estimate, provided by the manufacturer, of how much data can be written to a drive before some cells begin to fail and get taken out of service. (TBW tends to scale 1:1 with capacity, as it does here.) The warranty for this drive is good for five years or until you hit the rated TBW figure in writes, whichever comes first. Needless to say, if you do a lot of writing to your drives, the Z44Q is not an ideal choice for you.
The Z44Q is in the middle of the PCI Express 4.0 pack in terms of raw speed, alongside the TeamGroup T-Force Cardea Ceramic C440, the Silicon Power US70, the Seagate FireCuda 520, and the Spatium M470, which have identical sequential-read ratings of 5,000MBps. This puts it between speedsters like the ADATA XPG Gammix S70, the Samsung SSD 980 Pro, and the Mushkin Gamma—all of which have rated read speeds of 7,000MBps or higher—and value propositions like the Editors’ Choice-winning ADATA XPG S50 Lite, whose read speed is rated at 3,900MBps.
Dual Cooling Solutions
We have come to expect new TeamGroup internal SSDs to include at least one piece of heat-dissipating kit, and the Z44Q is no exception. It comes with two cooling solutions. The first, suitable for laptops or tight spaces on motherboards, is a flat, thin graphene heat spreader—similar to the one found on the company’s T-Force Cardea Zero Z440 and Cardea A440—which attaches to the drive with a sticky thermal strip.
The other is a larger metal heatsink for desktop environments, a black, finned device with bronze-colored trim. We tested the Z44Q with this aluminum heatsink attached, rather than relying on the standard over-slot heatsink already in place on our testbed’s motherboard as we usually do.
Testing the TeamGroup Z44Q: Your QLC Roots Are Showing
We test PCIe 4.0 solid-state drives on a testbed desktop system with an MSI Godlike X570 motherboard and AMD Ryzen 9 CPU installed. The testbed has 16GB of DDR4 Corsair Dominator RAM clocked to 3,600MHz and an Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics card. (See more about how we test SSDs.)
PCMark 10 Overall Storage and Trace Testing
The PCMark 10 overall storage benchmark, from UL—the world’s leading independent benchmark developer—runs a full slate of typical drive-access tasks. The Overall Score reported below is the software’s sanctioned results, representing how well a drive does throughout the entire PCMark 10 run.
After the Overall Score are some more granular measures derived from PCMark 10’s background “traces.” These tests simulate how quickly a drive is capable of launching a particular program—or, in the first case, completing the Windows 10 startup procedure.
Next comes a game-launching test set, which simulates how quickly a drive can read shallow-depth small random 4K packages, one of the more commonly used file-block sizes for game installations. The drives are also put through a launch test for Adobe creative apps. As anyone who works with video or images in Photoshop or Premiere Pro can tell you, these powerful programs can leave you waiting as they launch.
Last up are the PCMark 10 copy tests, also derived from PCMark 10 traces. These numbers are not directly comparable to the straight sequential-throughput numbers achieved in benchmarks like Crystal DiskMark 6.0 and AS-SSD, charted below, due to the way this score is calculated and the nature of (and differences between) the source data sets.
The Z44Q’s PCMark 10 Storage Overall Score of 1,518 is comparable to several QLC PCIe 4.0 SSDs, such as the Sabrent Rocket Q (1,401), as well as the TLC-based Lexar NM620, a PCIe 3.0 drive. Its score is well short of PCIe 4.0 speedsters such as the Crucial P5 Plus (3,022), ADATA XPG Gammix S70 (2,795), and Samsung SSD 980 Pro (2,655), all Editors’ Choice award winners, as well as the TeamGroup T-Force Cardea Z440 (2,383). The Z44Q’s scores were a bit below par in the PCMark 10 trace tests, including the ISO and file copy tests.
Crystal DiskMark Sequential Speed and AS-SSD Copy Tests
The Crystal DiskMark 6.0 sequential tests provide a more traditional measure, simulating best-case, straight-line transfers of large files. After that comes a series of file and folder transfers done in the SSD benchmarking utility AS-SSD. This trio of tests involves copying large files or folders from one location on the test drive to another.
The Z44Q’s sequential-read and -write scores in Crystal DiskMark (4,878MBps and 3,554MBps) were fairly close to its rated read and write speeds of 5,000MBps and 3,700MBps. Its 4K read results were above average, while its 4K write speed was below par. In AS-SSD testing, its ISO, Program, and Game speed results were all slightly below par.
Verdict: It’s All About the Capacity
The Z44Q embodies the best (high capacity and low cost per gigabyte) and the worst (low write durability) of QLC-drive technology. As a PCIe 4.0 NVMe internal solid-state drive, the Z44Q showed good 4K read scores, as well as sequential-read and -write results in line with its ratings, on our benchmark tests, but ho-hum scores otherwise. It’s best as a entry-level value proposition, and that at the 2TB size we tested. Although it comes in a cavernous 4TB version, by current pricing the 2TB model is the more cost-effective option. Plus, it comes with TeamGroup’s trademark extras—an aluminum heatsink and a graphene heat spreader.
If you need a sheer speedster in a PCIe 4.0 drive, look to the ADATA S70, Crucial P5 Plus, or Samsung 980 Pro mentioned earlier. But for general-purpose use, provided that you won’t be writing enormous amounts of data to it day in and day out, the T-Force Cardea Zero Z44Q is a cost-effective, high-capacity option that will do the job.
