Aluminum or graph: Team Group Cardea IOPS SSD with two cooling options

Cardea IOPS SSD

With the Cardea IOPS SSD, Team Group lets the customer choose the cooler. The M.2 SSD with PCIe interface comes with both a thicker heat sink made of aluminum and a flat strip equipped with graphene. This ensures flexibility depending on the space available in the system.

Aluminium or graph depending on space and power requirements

Compared to a bare "M.2" SSD, the aluminum cooler is supposed to improve heat dissipation by 15 percent, while the graphene strip is still nine percent, according to the manufacturer. The aluminum cooler lets the thickness of the M.2 SSD rise to 12.9 mm, which prevents use in the notebook or on the motherboard back. With the graphene cooler it is only 3.7 mm thickness.In addition, the SSD with aluminum cooler is 1.4 mm wider and weighs 45 grams. With graphene the width remains at 22 mm and the weight at only 9 grams.

Cardea IOPS M.2 PCIe SSD

The Cardea IOPS SSD is only offered in a variant with 1 TB of storage space, there are no other models. In the form factor M.2-2280 with 80 mm length PCIe 3.0 x4 forms the electrical interface, the logical interface is NVMe 1.3. Details on the controller and the NAND flash are not yet available. In the top, the SSD should achieve sequential data transfers with 3,400 MB/s reading and 3,000 MB/s writing. Indicated in the name is the high performance for a PCIe-3.0 SSD with optional transfers, where Team Group should read 680,000 IOPS and write 670,000 IOPS. However, such values are usually only achieved in remote scenarios with a large command queue and over a short period of time, as is the case in some benchmarks.

Market launch initially only in North America

The SSD is specified with 1,665 TB TBW and is sold with a five year warranty at a price of 165 US dollars (before tax). There is no information yet on the price and market launch in Germany.

Many NVMe SSDs in M.2 format are now sold without high-build heat sinks. This may also be due to the fact that cooling plates for the M.2 slots are already supplied with younger-generation motherboards. On the part of the M.2 SSDs, coatings on the controller package or copper foils in the type adhesive are now more often used for better heat dissipation. Team Group relies on a mix of graphene and copper in the Cardea Zero Z440 with PCIe 4.0, which is apparently also the case with the Cardea IOPS.