TeamGroup Z540 M.2 PCIe SSD & DARK AirFlow I SSD Cooler Review

How Much Does it Cost?

The TeamGroup Z540 M.2 PCIe SSD is available now on Amazon with a price of £257.42, which is pretty competitive given the overall performance and capacity. Sure, it’s not “cheap” but these ultra-fast Gen5 drives are seriously high-end stuff, so it’ll be a while before the prices come down too much. The DARK AirFlow I SSD Cooler is sold separately, and unfortunately I couldn’t find a retail link for it outside of this one on eBay, but prices are expected to be around £50.

Overview

When it comes to high performance PC building, storage can be one of the most impactful components. If you want your games to load faster, your assets to popular quicker, your boot times reduced, file transfers to be swift, then the best way to get that is with a super-fast M.2 SSD. While the TeamGroup Z540 isn’t quite the fastest we’ve tested to date, it’s pretty damn close, but comes in a fair bit cheaper than the bleeding-edge flagship drives. Basically 90% of the thrills but about 30% cheaper than any slightly faster drives.

If you’re just dropping it into your motherboard and using the built-in heatsink, I’d suggest it’s a motherboard that has PCIe 5 (obviously), but also a pretty robust heatsink. Like all fast Gen5 drives, it can get pretty toasty, and keeping it cool will avoid your read and write speeds from throttling. The additional air cooler we tested is pretty extreme, and if you’re just gaming, it’s likely overkill. However, keeping the drive cool and running efficiently is no bad thing, especially if you’re dealing with huge read/write loads from rendering, file transfers, etc.

It’s no surprise this drive is fast though, it uses the markets best controller, the Phison E26, it has a massive 4GB LPDDR4 cache, and 2 x 1TB 3D TLC NAND flash memory, and putting all the best components together makes for one of the best drives on the market, it’s as simple as that.

Should I Buy One?

With performance that’s nearly double that of Gen4 drives, and over 22 times the performance of traditional 2.5″ SATA SSDs, the TeamGroup Z540 is a massive performance upgrade for any system. Pushing extreme speeds with ease, and with the additional cooler, it’ll keep up with intense workloads without risk of performance lost. Easily one of the best drives on the market right now, and the price makes it one of the most appealing super-fast drives on the market right now.