Introduction
Continuing our chain of SSD reviews of those based on the Phison E12 controller, we have the TeamGroup MP34 in the lab today. Phison has really helped in quickly progressing the price drop of the SSD market thanks to a lot of partners as well as a healthy supply from Phison. This helps increase SSD adoption for end users thanks to the price positioning of these drives as well as open up a healthier market, even for those who are using in-house controllers or from competing designs. The larger, more affordable price-per-GB will help establish SSDs as the main storage option or make them easily accessible for upgraders making their first jump to SSDs.
TeamGroup is not new to SSDs and their active participation in the enthusiast scene has helped them get a sense of how to position their products. The TeamGroup MP34 is one of their consumer-market offering and is priced attractively. The MP34 isn’t anything revolutionary, its actually quite standard although it does have cost-saving implementations like choosing DDR3 instead of DDR4. We’ve moved past 256GB from this point, urging our readers to adopt a 500GB or more as the primary starting point for either an app drive or boot drive. Still, let’s see what the numbers tell us.
What TeamGroup has to say about the MP34:
Offering top performanceThe new force, MP34 has joined TEAMGROUP’s M.2 solid state drive series. The MP34 supports new generation of PCIe Gen3 x4 high speed interface, the latest NVMe1.3 protocol and the specification of M.2 2280 PCIe solid state drive. With its superior performance, the sequential read/write speed can reach up to 3000/2600 MB/s. It is capable to reduce operating delays of the operating system and game/software, and delivers the finest and smoothest gaming experience and an extreme high speed performance without any lag even reading/writing large amounts of game data, complex graphics and motion processing algorithms, or loading heavy duty video/graphics editing software.
Read on to find out more about the TeamGroup MP34 M.2 NVMe SSD in this review.
Specification and Features – TeamGroup MP34
- Using new generation of 3D flash memory: Capacity, performance, and durability are greatly improved.
- PCIe interface – Supports latest NVMe 1.3 protocol.
- M.2 2280 specification: Supports the next-generation platforms of Intel and AMD. Suitable for both desktop and notebook.
- Product warranty – 5-year product warranty. Free technical support service
Packaging and Closer Look
TeamGroup packages the MP34 in a small, colored box with the SSD peeking through. The front shows us the capacity in large print as well as some details, particularly the warranty.
Inside the box we have a plastic holder with the drive tucked inside.
The TeamGroup MP34 features a standard 2280-length SSD with a sticker on top.
Performance Testing – TeamGroup MP34
Test Setup
Processor: Intel Core i9 9900K
Motherboard: ASUS ROG MAXIMUS XI EXTREME
Memory: G.Skill TridentZ DDR4-3600 16GB
Storage: WD Blue SSD 1TB SATA (OS), TeamGroup MP34 256GB
PSU: Seasonic Platinum 1050w
Cooling: Fractal Design Celsius S36 AIO Liquid cooler
Monitor: Viewsonic VX2475smhl-4K
VGA: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE
Potential Performance (ATTO Disk Benchmark)
ATTO Disk Benchmark benchmarks a drive’s read and write speeds with increasing file sizes and graphs them.
Anvil Storage Utilities
Anvil Storage Utilities is a disk benchmarking utility designed to offers a simpler method of scoring a storage device’s performance for both read and write as well as overall. The scores are presented in scores from the benchmark window.
AS SSD Benchmark
AS SSD benchmarks SSDs and provides a score. In our charts, we’ll show you the performance results instead. AS SSD uses synthetic read/write tests with selectable test size.
Crystal Disk Mark v6
Crystal Disk Mark is storage benchmarking software was developed by “hiyohiyo” of Japan, and is available for free. This benchmark measures sequential, and random read/write speeds of storage devices.
ez IOmeter
ezIOmeter is a user-friendly port of the popular IOmeter benchmark. IOmeter is a professional load testing tool for measuring storage performance for enterprise solutions.
Conclusion
The MP34 is heavily positioned as a budget offering but again it contests heavily with other Taiwanese offerings, most of which are from older tech giving peak 2000MB transfers. The MP34 extends this a bit for a negligible increase in price.
There’s really not a lot to say about the MP34. Its price:performance ratio is excellent and we highly advise starting off with the 512GB capacity model. Its main competitor is the faster Patriot Viper VPN100 but this drive suffers from compatibility issues especially for mobile systems as well as compact builds. That said, this is a very flexible option for anyone wishing to move into SSDs and is an easy drop-in upgrade for laptops or systems that require a simple SSD without a heatsink or anything.
TeamGroup offers the MP34 with capacities of 256GB, 512GB and 1TB and prices scale well. If you’re looking for a value-based SSD fit for multiple platform use, the MP34 is an excellent choice.
We’ll clarify with TeamGroup the actual warranty but for now, we’ll assume the MP34 is backed by a 3-year warranty. TeamGroup has confirmed that starting November 2019, the MP34 is now under a 5-year warranty. We give it our B2G Value Award.