Team Group MP44 4TB review

It wasn’t that long ago that novel gaming PCs came with a 256GB SSD as the main drive and a 2TB HDD to store all your games. Now you can easily replace both with one enormous SSD. And with the 4TB Team Group MP44, you can do it without having to spend a diminutive fortune.

That said, paying over $220 it’s still a lot of money for an SSD, but it works out to less than six cents per gigabyte. For a drive with 7,400 and 6,900 MB/s continuous read/write performance, that’s about as economical as it gets today. So you’d be forgiven for thinking that Team Group must operate low-quality components to keep the price low.

The MP44 uses the same controller and NAND flash memory modules as those in the Lexar NM790, and no one has ever accused this SSD of being economical. It’s simply a coincidence that Team Group has sourced the best value parts on the market and delivered them all in a package free of extras and fancy features.

For example, there is no DRAM cache to lend a hand maintain consistent performance. Instead, like all such non-DRAM SSDs, it uses part of its capacity in pseudo-SLC mode. Various types of NAND flash memory are available (SLC, TLC, QLC, etc.), and the 232-layer YMTC modules in MP44 are TLC-based.

They have lower efficiency than SLC modules, but offer much greater capacity. However, up-to-date TLC chips can handle some sections as if they were SLC, and the MP44 uses this high-speed section as a cache – buffering data transfers to ensure the drive runs at full speed for as long as possible.

Another thing the MP44 lacks compared to the competition is a heatsink, and with a maximum operating temperature of 70°C it’s critical that the drive is installed on a motherboard with a decent M.2 heatsink, as well as having good airflow inside.

This limit is 15°C lower compared to the WD Black SN850X, the best gaming SSD currently available, meaning the Team Group drive is not ideal in situations where the SSD will not be particularly well cooled (e.g. . inside a console, laptop or diminutive form factor computer).

A graphene label is included with the kit, covering all the memory modules and the controller, but I found it to be quite basic to remove, suggesting that it is perhaps not as effective at dissipating heat as you might think given the operate of graphene.

Benchmarking SSDs is both straightforward and complex. It’s basic to throw it into your computer and run a series of tests to see how it performs in various scenarios, but at the same time, many factors can influence the results you get.

For example, if you’re using a PCIe 4.0 M.2 slot on a motherboard managed by a chipset rather than a CPU, you probably won’t see the full performance of the drive.

In reality, however, such differences rarely affect performance. You certainly won’t notice that your games load much slower if you operate the chipset socket and not the CPU.

As you can see from the results above, the Team Group MP44 performs better than any of the other SSDs in the charts, although some of the test results are so similar that it’s fairer to say that the MP44 is just as good as any other DRAM-less SSD.

Team Group sells 4TB SSDs with heatsinks, but they are obviously more costly than the MP44. If your gaming PC is not best suited for an SSD without a heatsink, you may be better off choosing one of these.

Performing a long and demanding sequence of data writes in MP44 highlights the size of the pseudo-SLC cache. The average write speed of about 5,900 MB/s is maintained for about 196 seconds before dropping to 2,650 MB/s, which indicates a maximum cache size of just over 1 TB unless you are trying to write multiple huge files of 4K video files to disk for all the time, the MP44 can easily handle that 5900 figure.

The cache size is much larger than I expected. For example, the WD Blue SN5000 drive has a maximum SLC cache of around 800 MB, and the Lexar NM790 drive, which uses the same components, is even smaller at 600 MB. MP44 doesn’t do as well with this drive for long-term writes, but it’s not far, and I’d take a larger cache any day.

Please note that all energetic SLC cache sizes are dependent on the amount of free space available on the SSD – the fuller it is, the smaller the maximum cache size can be.

During this test, the Team Group drive achieved a reported maximum temperature of 66°C in an open platform PC without busy case cooling. That’s a little close to the thermal limit for my taste, but it’ll probably be okay if you have a decent amount of fans over it.

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However, I have no complaints about the overall performance of the Team Group MP44. Even when the SLC cache is full, the write speed is more than acceptable. What’s intriguing, however, is that once the MP44 reaches about 50% of its capacity, the write speed drops to an average of 980 MB/s, while the NM790 remains steady at 2,700 MB/s.

This is probably because the controller throttles the speed to prevent it from reaching the thermal limit, but if you need to regularly save 2TB files, an inexpensive SSD like the MP44 probably shouldn’t be your number one choice.

With an endurance of 3,000 TBW, you can save 1 TB of data on the MP44 in total every day eight years before reaching this number. You can certainly operate the MP44 as a primary drive and not worry about its durability, that’s for sure.

There’s plenty to like about Team Group MP44. It’s very good value for money for its capacity – there are cheaper 4TB drives available, but they certainly don’t have the same level of performance as this one – and it’s probably all the SSD you’ll ever need in your gaming PC. Personally, I prefer to have multiple drives to separate applications, documents, games, and so on, but I appreciate that some people are perfectly content to operate just one enormous drive.

However, I would like it to have a higher thermal limit, and if I were mounting the MP44 in one of my rigs, I would make sure there was a enormous fan blowing through it at all times. This is complex to achieve if mounted in the main M.2 slot because the graphics card will radiate heat right next to it.

But as a secondary drive, placed in the lower M.2 slot, I wouldn’t have such qualms, and it seems to be the ideal operate scenario for the Team Group MP44. Sure it doesn’t have DRAM, but if it’s this good, who really needs it?