After Sony enabled the SSD upgrade in the PlayStation 5, it was a matter of time before makers of actual drives announced SSDs optimized for the console. This week TeamGroup Japan unveiled its T-Force Cardea A440 Pro Special Series SSDs that are tailored specifically for PS5. In fact, these drives are the highest-performing SSDs that TeamGroup has introduced so far.
TeamGroup's T-Force Cardea A440 Pro Special Series SSDs are set to be available in 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB configurations to meet gamer requirements. As for performance, the new drives are rated for up to 7400 MB/s sequential read speed as well as an up to 7000 MB/s sequential write speed, reports Hermitage Akihabara. To put the numbers into context: TeamGroup's flagship T-Force Cardea A440 SSDs for PCs are specced for up to 7000/6900 MB/s read/write speeds and are among the fastest M.2 drives available today.
TeamGroup's SSDs for Sony's PlayStation 5 feature a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface, come in an M.2-2280 form-factor, and are equipped with a thin graphene heat spreader to ensure proper heat dissipation even when PS5's SSD bay is closed. Some evaluations posted at Reddit indicate that drives with large heat spreaders work better when the bay remains open, which is logical as air coolers need air to work. To that end, it is not surprising that the SSD maker decided to use a thin graphene heat spreader on its product for PS5. It will be interesting to find out how this drive will perform with a covered and with an uncovered bay.
TeamGroup's T-Force Cardea A440 Pro Special Series SSDs
Swipe to scroll horizontally
Row 0 - Cell 0
1TB
2TB
4TB
8TB
Sequential Read Speed
7200 MB/s
7400 MB/s
7400 MB/s
7400 MB/s
Sequential Write Speed
6000 MB/s
7000 MB/s
7000 MB/s
7000 MB/s
TBW
700
1400
3000
3000
DWPD
0.38
0.38
0.41
0.2
It is pretty evident that TeamGroup's T-Force Cardea A440 Pro Special Series SSDs are essentially versions of the company's flagship T-Force Cardea A440 family that feature very high capacities, are equipped with a firmware optimized for bursty performance to maximize game load times and processes like saving (which are a relatively short procedures) and a graphene heat spreader to improve cooling performance when the bay is closed. Unlike PCs and workstations, game consoles do not need high sustained read/write performance, so maximizing performance in burst mode makes a lot of sense, at least until PS5 games get to large that they will increase load times.
TeamGroup's T-Force Cardea A440 Pro Special Series SSDs will be available in October. The drives will be covered with a five-year warranty and will be rated for 0.2 ~ 0.4 drive writes per day (DWPD), which is in line with what the company offers for its SSDs aimed at high-end client PCs these days.
Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
This is actually a really good drive even for PC games that are to be played around 60 fps (that's most games with the videocard situation). Unless you play some insane game that is constantly reading large chunks of data, the size to real world performance ratio is really, really good.
The maximum size is bigger than my biggest HDD, which is impressive. Put a couple of these in RAID 0 and you have yourself a beast for gaming.
