Of course, if you're in an unusual cooling and upgrade situation that demands an SSD with a thin, stand-alone heatsink, the Ceramic could be a lifesaver.
This allowed for full contact between the ceramic element and the heatsink, and while we would have hoped this added cooling power would have translated to faster speeds under load, as you'll see in our benchmarks below, that wasn't always the case. That said, the one bonus for the ceramic, in this case, was that it actually managed to fit underneath our motherboard's attached cooling plates. That's because, for all the heat-sapping capabilities a millimeter-thick ceramic element might inherently have, a giant piece of metal stuck to a whirring fan will always do the job better than any passive cooling could. As noted, TeamGroup hasn't been shy in that regard, with some big, honking passive heatsinks like we've seen in the TeamGroup T-Force Cardea II, or at the other end of the spectrum, in its super-trim Cardea Zero Z440.Īs is the case for almost every SSD review (notable recent exception: the ADATA XPG Gammix S70 and its sticky, super-thick heatsink), we removed the ceramic element before installing the drive into our test system.
But do you really need to go that far just to transfer around a couple of file folders?Īs the PCIe 4.0 generation has grown in the world of SSDs, cooling solutions have at once become more flamboyant and functional. Even at the peak of massive, world-class physics experiments like the Large Hadron Collider, to get the job done, you want a ceramic-based solution. Want to cool a superconductor down to room temperature? Ceramic is the material you want. As far as heat-wicking materials go, ceramic is objectively one of the best. Now, on to the star of the show: that heatsink. (TBW measures total rated write capacity until the drive eventually starts to shut down worn-out cells for "overuse.") Its 1,800 terabytes written (TBW) rating is industry-standard at this point for PCIe 4.0 drives at its capacity, so while the Cardea Ceramic C440 doesn't take a hit here, it's not leading the charge, either. It employs the NVMe protocol over the PCIe 4.0 bus, features a Phison E16 controller, and is rated to hit a maximum throughput of 5,000MBps read and 4,400MBps write in the 1TB version we tested.Īt 19 cents per gigabyte in the 1TB capacity we tested, the Cardea Ceramic C440 falls at the premium end of the overall SSD spectrum, but it's a midrange entry among other PCIe 4.0 drives we've tested, such as the Seagate FireCuda 520 and the Samsung SSD 980. The T-Force Cardea Ceramic C440 is a four-lane PCI Express (PCIe) 4.0 drive manufactured on an M.2 Type-2280 (80mm long) design. It's sleek, and fast enough for most folks, but in an upgrade world dominated by motherboard-based cooling solutions, the ceramic sliver feels secondary in the face of the numbers the drive beneath it serves up.
As one of the pricier-per-gigabyte SSDs on shelves today ($189.99 for the 1TB model we tested), the Ceramic competes with tough SSD stalwarts such as the Samsung SSD 980 Pro, and in that face-off, comes up short. It might look cool (pun intended), but the drive doesn't always garner the performance we hope for at this price point. In contrast, the heatsink on TeamGroup's T-Force Cardea Ceramic C440 solid-state drive is a thin ceramic-based stripe, rather than an elaborate hunk of metal. Its drive coolers are often beefy, far-from-timid designs. In recent years, TeamGroup has been one of the more innovative companies approaching the problem of keeping your SSD cool under heavy loads.
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I also noticed some kind of screeching sound coming from my HDD - that's being going on for a while now but I never had any problems with the drive so far. Could it be that the HDD caused the freezing? Though the games I played weren't installed on that drive, maybe it had some kind of impact on the performance. I'm noow downloading a few games to see if there is still a problem with playing games. I used the Samsung Magician Software, HWInfo and HDTuner (that'S the one which identified the problems on my HDD and my old SSD). One diagnostic tool told me that my old SSD had some problem with a "threshold" - every other program couldn't detect anything.
If there was a problem with my new SSD, shouldn't Windows now freeze as well? Because so far, I had no problem with my new installation.
I made a mistake and deleted copies of my games so I have to download them again and try them. I cleaned up all SSDs and installed Windows on my new one. So, I used different programs to analyze my hardware and it seemed like there was a problem with my internal HDD (not one of the SSDs).