Team Group T-Force 512 GB CARDEA Liquid M.2 PCIe SSD

warhammer23 · October 13, 2020

Finally guys I got my dream liquid m.2 from T-Force - the Liquid Cardea. I have been wanting this one since I saw it last year. I ordered the half a TB one and there are 3 capacity options from 256GB to 1TB.

What so great about it well? Team Group has implemented a mini self contained water cooling system which consists of an aluminium plate designed to transfer heat into an acrylic chamber filled with liquid, for an M.2 drive, thus creating the world’s first water cooled NVMe drive.

This NVMe SSD is really cool (no pun intended) and the cooling design is even patented. It comes by default with the coolant in blue and you can change this to anything you want. T-Force promises at least 10°C improvement over standard M.2 drives while offering read/write speeds up to 3,400/3,000 MB/s and IOPs up to 450K/400K on the 1TB model.

Spec wise, all three capacity models use the PCIe 3.0 4x interface and NVMe 1.3 protocol, the same Phison E12 controller, are built on BiCS TLC memory cells (thus making use of an SLC cache as per any TLC drive) and come with a 5 years warranty (1 year for the liquid heatsink).

The performance and endurance numbers scale with the capacity. So we have 380, 800 and 1665 TBW respectively for the 256, 512GB and 1 TB models while the performance starts at Seq read/write of 3000/1000 MB for the 256 GB model, 3400/2000 MB for the 512GB and 3400/3000 MB for the 1 TB while the IOPs vary between 200k to 450k.

No other way to describe besides very cool ! The acrylic enclosure is fully transparent so you can see the coolant which as mentioned can be changed to any colour. The black plastic cover can be slide in and out in order to access the securing screw. Another great detail is the presence of a fill gauge on the side.

Ok wanted to install it in my ITX case so I can see it every time I open the side panel. One very important detail to mention with this specific motherboard (ASUS B550i STRIX) is the fact that the fill plug from the M.2 Cardea hits the main I/O plastic shroud. So, you have two options: either remove the shroud or cut out a small gap (like I did) since it’s just plastic. Also it goes without saying that the stock M.2 heatsink from the motherboard will not fit anymore since the liquid cooler is so tall.

Performance wise it behaves as you would expect from a quality TLC NVMe drive on the PCIe x4 3.0 bandwidth. I did also a big file transfer of 67GB mixed files (the installation game folder for The Division 2). It maintained ~1 GB/s write speed up until the SLC cache get filled (which I can’t find the exact capacity for this, but from my observation it happens after ~ 25 GB written, when it dips from 1 GB/s to around 600 MB/s).

Now for the temperature tests which we are all waiting for. Even in a hot ITX case like the DAN A4 SFX, with no airflow on the motherboard, it didn’t surpass 57 degrees C while my other M.2 drive was over 70C.

This clearly proves that the liquid solution T-Force employed works absolutely perfect and keeps the M.2 cool and thus virtually it will never throttle despite an ambient room temperature of 24 C and being practically on top of a very hot chipset which was around 77 degrees C.

So to conclude this thing really works despite my efforts to make it throttle in such a hot environment.