Introduction: T-FORCE Z540 M.2 Gen5 SSD Review
Despite most motherboards now offering Gen5 M.2 support in one way or another, adoption of these products have remained slow and many of the drives we’ve seen in June 2023 at COMPUTEX are just start to crop-up on retail. That means that for some markets, their first taste of Gen5 SSDs in 2024 are still the 10000MB/s drives from 2022. We’re seeing improvement though and the pace has seemingly started to pick-up with more brands now pumping out Gen5 SSDs.
In this review we’ll be looking at the TEAMGROUP’s 12,000+ MB/s rated SSD, the T-FORCE Z540 Gen5 NVMe M.2 SSD available in capacities from 1TB to 4TB. This is a Phison E26-controlled SSD with 232-layer Micron flash and it shares this assembly with a few other SSDs but with slight variations that push performance better than each other. We’ll take a look at how this SSD performs and more in this review! Read on!
Note: This drive not have the name TEAMGROUP T-FORCE CARDEA Z540 in the packaging but may appear online as such.
Features & Specification
Z540 M.2 PCIe SSD Specifications
Model | Capacity | Sequential Read Speed | Sequential Write Speed | TBW | Heatsink | Model Number |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Z540 M.2 PCIe SSD | 4TB | Up to 12,400 MB/s | Up to 11,800 MB/s | 2400TBW | YES | TM8FF1004T0C129 |
Z540 M.2 PCIe SSD | 2TB | Up to 12,400 MB/s | Up to 11,800 MB/s | 1200TBW | YES | TM8FF1002T0C129 |
Z540 M.2 PCIe SSD | 1TB | Up to 11,700 MB/s | Up to 9,500 MB/s | 600TBW | YES | TM8FF1001T0C129 |
More Product Specifications:
- Interface: PCIe Gen5x4 with NVMe
- Voltage: DC +3.3V
- Operating Temperature: 0ËšC ~ 70ËšC
- Storage Temperature: -40ËšC ~ 85ËšC
- Weight: 13g
- Dimensions: 80.0(L) x 22.0(W) x 3.7(H) mm
- Vibration: 80Hz~2000Hz/20G
- Shock: 1500G/0.5ms
- MTBF: 1,700,000 Hours
- Operating System Compatibility: Windows 11 / 10 / 8.1 / 8 / 7 / Vista, MAC OS 10.4 or later, Linux 2.6.33 or later
- Warranty: 5-year limited warranty
Closer Look: T-FORCE Z540 M.2 Gen5 SSD Review
The TEAMGROUP T-FORCE Z540 follows their gaming line of packaging art with the box showing a hero shot of the product. A cut out shows us the sticker side of the SSD. Our sample only came with the SSD with no paper documents or stickers.
TEAMGROUP’s T-FORCE Z540 is Phison- E26 controlled SSD with a standard M.2-2280 length PCB. The bundle comes with a patented graphen heatspreader with a bold print of the model name with the Z5 stylized much like their previous SSDs.
The T-FORCE Z540 SSD is a dual-layer SSD with flash chips on both sides. As this is the 1TB version, this means that the larger capacity models will be using denser flash rather than more as the PCB layout doesn’t seem to indicate the potential for adding more ICs.
Our TEAMGROUP rep tells us that the company has a patent on graphene heatspreaders for SSD and this is boldly stamped on the front of the box actually with US Patent #: US11051392B2. Looking this up at the USPTO we see that this is patent covering a certain way to make heatspreaders using graphene. The abstract details as below:
The present invention relates to a heat dissipating device disposed on a circuit board. The heat dissipating device is provided with a first glue layer, a first graphene composite heat dissipating layer, a second glue layer, a second graphene composite heat dissipating layer, and a resin layer in this order from bottom to top.
Furthermore, the first graÂphene composite heat dissipating layer and the second graphene composite heat dissipating layer are doped with a plurality of metal particles, and the first graphene composite heat dissipating layer and the second graphene composite heat dissipating layer are respectively covered by a metal layer. The above structure is simple, space-saving, and has good thermal conductivity.
In simple terms, TEAMGROUP is confident they have developed a superior graphene heatspreader and has filed for patent for it in the US, Taiwan and China. Based on the technical details, TEAMGROUP’s method increases dissipation better than traditional graphene sandwiches while also doing it in a thinner profile than what is normally used in the industry.
With consumers becoming more aware of part revisions and how they can affect performance down the line, we include the key components in our SSD reviews. Below are the components used by TEAMGROUP T-FORCE Z540 1TB SSD sample as pictured:
- Controller: Phison E26
- Flash:Micron 232-Layer 3D TLC (3JC2D NY195)Â
- DRAM: SK Hynix H9HCNNNBKUML
Test Setup
Processor: Intel Core i9-14900K
Motherboard: ROG Maximus Z790 HERO
Memory: Kingston FURY Renegade DDR5-6400 32GB (2×16)
Storage: Kingston FURY Renegade SSD (OS), tested drive as listed
PSU: FSP Hydro GT Pro 1000W
Cooling: NZXT Kraken X72 RGB
Monitor: ROG PG27U
VGA: ASUS GTX 1050 Ti Phoenix
Our sample for this test is the TEAMGROUP T-FORCE Z540 SSD 1TB capacity version
Linear Performance Testing
SSD performance rating especially on write usually only achieved in optimal sitautions particularly sequential transfers. In this we use a script to write 1GB data files to fill-up the drive or until we hit the saturation point where the drive doesn’t delivery its rated performance.
In this test we see the Transcend MTE250H drop performance by 97GB written and then perform at SATA speeds by this point moving from 1680MB/s average to 423MB/s for 831GB more. It then subsides to fill out the rest of the disk.
Crystal DiskMark
CrystalDIskMark has been the most actively updated disk benchmark amongst all the ones we use and is effectively the most reliable. Unfortunately, version to version results are not comparable which limits the ability to extrapolate comparative data. Still its a reliable and direct benchmark. Like the previous, it allows control over test data pattern, the test data size, amount of passes and individual benchmark control.
PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark
PCMark 10 introduces a set of four storage benchmarks that use relevant real-world traces from popular applications and common tasks to fully test the performance of the latest modern drives.
3DMark Storage Benchmark
The 3DMark Storage Benchmark uses traces recorded from popular games and gaming-related activities to measure real-world gaming performance, such as:
- Loading Battlefield V from launch to the main menu.
- Loading Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 from launch to the main menu.
- Loading Overwatch® from launch to the main menu.
- Recording a 1080p gameplay video at 60 FPS with OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) while playing Overwatch.
- Installing The Outer Worlds from the Epic Games Launcher.
- Saving game progress in The Outer Worlds.
- Copying the Steam folder for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive from an external SSD to the system drive.
Final Fantasy XIV Benchmark
Final Fantasy XIV has a standalone benchmark application for PC, always updated to the latest game expansion with the latest Endwalker benchmark delivering some very nice graphical updates. A long-standing feature of the Final Fantasy XIV standalone benchmark is the loading data is captures which is a summary of all the load times between scenes in the benchmark.
Playstation 5 Testing
NOTE: As of September 2023, we’ve updated our PlayStation 5 to have a massive heatsink during testing which may have improved performance for drives tested since then.
Still, as of this testing done in the week of October 18, performance has increased significantly for SSDs on the PS5. This has been verified with older drives we’ve tested including as indicated by the Seagate FireCuda 530 in the list (denoted as Re-test). That said, this list will be nuked in a later review which will include some of our recent drives only.
The Sony Playstation 5 supports storage expansion thru M.2 devices and many SSD makers are advertising their drives as supporting the Playstation 5. That said, we’ve included PS5 bandwidth testing in our reviews. We use the Playstation 5’s internal read speed test for the primary initialization. Due to how Sony designed this benchmark, our testing averages at least 5 reads with the drive formatted after a rest period for best thermal results.
Conclusion
I seriously doubt anyone forking out the cash for a Gen5 SSD would settle for 1TB but as a boot+app+game drive, it is a good first taste into what modern Gen5 SSDs an offer and TEAMGROUP is the first to have the common sense not to force a heatsink together with the T-FORCE Z540 as most motherboards rocking a Gen5 M.2 slot already know it needs decent cooling and boards that can’t cool most Gen5 SSDs with their built in shrouds would obviously be criticized.
Talking about performance, the T-FORCE Z540 1TB can soak 100GB of data before dipping in performance as it fills its pseudo SLC cache. This drops it to slower speeds with around 800GB written totally putting the SSD to around SATA speeds. Its going to be rare to see these numbers but the closest scenario would be if you’re simply moving your older 1TB SSD with almost 90% filled and dumping it to this SSD, if most files are large files like those for games, you’d see performance close to this but real-world scenarios like the OS and its tons of tiny files would really slow things down.
For the most part, overall performance is incredibly fast and I expected this drive to decimate both 10,000MB/s Gen5 SSDs we tested before but the 1TB capacity shows how capacity affects performance be it from faster components or larger DRAM.
The TEAMGROUP T-FORCE Z540 should be available in the Philippines soon with US pricing currently listing the 1TB T-FORCE Z540 Gen5 SSD at 149$ while the 2TB capacity one goes for $249 so estimates for the 4TB model is around $500. Adjusting for PH pricing, this could see this drive still land at around PHP12,000 or higher for the ***1TB*** (read: ONE TERABYTE) and upwards of mid-PHP-20,000s for the 2TB version. I’ve been on the wait for Crucial to drop their 4TB pricing as I want to migrate our test bench to Gen5 4TB but pricing has really been restrictive for these drives.
And that’s one of the issues with smaller capacity SSDs as many systems will only be afforded one slot so I really hope brands push capacity more if they really can’t drop prices first as adoption is not only limited by cost and supply but the actual hardware not allowing a lot of these drives to be used at the same time on mainstream systems.
Ultimately, it is still the fastest drive overall that we’ve tested and Gen5 still has some wiggle room until it reaches full speed but options are still limited and drives like the TEAMGROUP T-FORCE Z540 will primarily be reliant on brand reputation and TEAMGROUP’s T-FORCE gaming brand has had a very good streak for a few years now which have given them good brand equity in both the extreme and enthusiast market.
For those looking for their first taste of Gen5 SSD speed and know what they’re looking for (and I mean really know they want to go with a Gen5 SSD regardless of capacity), the TEAMGROUP T-FORCE Z540 is a good start. TEAMGROUP backs the T-FORCE Z540 with a 5-year warranty. I give it our B2G Performance badge.
1 Comment
Lyndon Rebutoc very very slow adoption din for some reason, even if dx12 ung game very select ung gumagamit madalas sony ps games pa meron