TeamGroup T-Force Z44A5 PCIe 4 2TB M.2 SSD Review
Peter Donnell / 5 months ago
The drive is rated for up to 5000 MB/s read and 4500 MB/s write, and while your choice of motherboard, CPU, RAM and other components can have an impact on this, clearly, the drive is capable of just a little bit more, exceeding the read speeds by 16.84 MB/s, but even more so in the write test, with 297.66 MB/s more than expected!
Running the IPS test, we see nearly 250000 IPS on the Q32T1 test, and 165000 in the write IPS, reflecting what we saw in the previous test for overall speed.
This is a fantastic score for Gen 4×4 drive, scoring well over 22000 points, and again showing read and write speeds of around 4000 MB/s, keeping in mind Anvil speeds are always lower than that of CrystalDiskMark.
The drive gets up to top speed remarkably quickly, hitting around 4.4 GB/s from just 32KB, while many other drives don’t get up to speed until 64 or even as far as 256 KB loads.
The drive responds every quickly, showing sub 1 second loading times for ISO, program and gaming loads.
The access times are extremely fast too, with reads coming in at just 0.015ms, and writes at 0.061ms.
AS SSD showed exceptional IPS in all tests, and while not as extreme as Gen 5 drives, this is about the best we’ve seen from a Gen 4×4 drive.
AJA is great for testing the drive for high-end camera devices and with the 10bit YUV 1GB test file, and at over 4000 MB/s it passed with flying colours.
For the PCMark 10 storage test, we see it has no issues with gaming loading times, with fast access times in all games, which should mean that drive access times won’t cause any unwanted stuttering.
For the compression test, things went pretty well, with a couple of drops in the write speeds at regular intervals as new blocks are compressed, but the drive is quickly back to full speed when needed, and overall consistent read speeds throughout
A just under 12 seconds the Final Fantasy XVI benchmark scored very strongly, resulting in a rating of “extremely high”.
Throughout all of our testing, the drive never had any issues with thermal throttling, with a peak temperature of just 49c, it’s clear the graphene pad is working well, and it’s unlikely you’ll even need additional cooling to maintain the drive performance.
