Summary
The TEAMGROUP M200 is an extremely fast portable SSD with excellent sequential read and write performance. It’s well designed, with a good physical construction, and it’s competitively priced.
It warrants our firm recommendation if you’re looking for a very fast portable drive.
Note, you’ll only get the very fast performance using USB 3.2 Gen 2×2. Don’t assume you’ll get that performance with USB4 / Thunderbolt. For example, when tested with the Intel NUC Pro 13, we saw read/write speeds of around 1000 MB/s. While the NUC has two Thunderbolt 4 ports (USB 4) which technically offer 40Gbps support, it doesn’t support USB 3.2 Gen 2×2. And on desktop machines, many budget motherboards still don’t offer USB 3.2 Gen 2×2, but a PCI card can be installed to get the maximum speeds.
The internal SSD in the TEAMGROUP is NVMe and uses TLC. Benchmark and bare drive everyday performance of the 1TB mode was consistent with a 20 Gbps while caching data. When the NAND is written off cache, TLC helps maintains good performance. It’s much better than drives with QLC.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Specifications
Page 2 – Benchmarks
Page 3 – Summary
Does the NUC have USB 3.2 Gen2x2 ports?
The USB standards are confusing for many people, mainly because the current USB 3.2 branding also encompasses the older USB 3.0 standard to create a total of three varieties of USB 3.2.
The three common versions of USB 3.2 are:
USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 (originally USB 3.2) which is called SuperSpeed USB 20Gbps and has a maximum speed of 20Gbps
USB 3.2 Gen 2 (originally USB 3.1) which is called SuperSpeed USB 10Gbps and has a maximum speed of 10Gbps
USB 3.2 Gen 1 (originally USB 3.0) which is called SuperSpeed USB and has a maximum speed of 5Gbps.
The NUC has 3 USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports and two USB 4 (Thunderbolt ports). These ports (including the Thunderbolt ports) give a maximum speed of 10 Gbps with the M200 SSD not the 20 Gbps that this SSD delivers with USB 3.2 Gen 2×2.
I see, interesting.
How do I know what type of ports i’ve got on my computer?
It’s best to check your specific motherboard’s manual.
And bear in mind if you have a USB 3.2 cable that can say only handle 5Gbps, you’ll only get up to 5Gbps even if you have USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 port(s).
The larger storage sizes look really useful.
Can USB-4 give the 20 Gbps that this SSD offers?
With some devices it can, with other devices (such as the NUC) it doesn’t.