Summary
The TEAMGROUP Z44A7 2TB is an all-round excellent PCIe 4.0 NVME SSD that would work great in a laptop, mini MC, desktop or PS5. It gets our solid recommendation.
From our testing, it performs very well in Linux. The drive didn’t exhibit any performance issues which we’ve seen with some other NVMes under certain real-world workloads when running in Linux. Performance is extremely good for a DRAM-less SSD.
Stability is also excellent in part helped because the SSD is extremely good at dissipating heat which is very important for laptops and mini PC users as it’ll avoid throttling issues which can happen in situations with other Gen4 4 NVMe 4.0 x4 SSDs. Our power consumption tests show that it is also extremely energy-efficient.
Leaving benchmarks aside, does the Z44A7 offer a worthwhile improvement in desktop performance in Linux in a PC with a slower NVMe such as a Samsung 980 1TB? The answer is definitely yes; there’s a noticeable improvement. The 5 year warranty and 1500 TBW are respectable too.
Z44A7 is not yet currently available in the UK, so we don’t currently have pricing information. We expect the price to be at the lower end of the spectrum given that this is a DRAM-less drive.
UPDATE: The Z44A7 is now available for pre order in the UK from Overclockers.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – Benchmarks
Page 3 – Summary
1500TBW isn’t very good.
If you move 100GB a week you can do that for about 3,000 weeks or 57.5 years.