TeamGroup has introduced its new family of SSDs that are equipped with a dedicated all-in-one liquid cooling system (LCS). The T-Force Cardea Liquid II drives will be aimed at hardcore enthusiasts who demand maximum performance and an extreme, but fancy, addition to their rigs.
The T-Force Cardea Liquid II is in development, so TeamGroup hasn't shared any specifications or performance stats just yet. But it is evident from TeamGroup's images that we are dealing with a standard M.2 2280 SSD, presumably with a PCIe x4 interface. Assuming that we are dealing with a PCIe 4.0 x4 bus, performance of this SSD will likely top at 7,400 MB/s, so the key advantage brought by the sophisticated cooling system will be sustained performance over prolonged periods, which not all M.2 drives can offer.
A dedicated liquid cooling system is meant to maximize cooling efficiency and ensure that the drive operates without throttling even under prolonged high loads. Such workloads are pretty rare on desktops, but since there are professionals who run workstation applications on their desktops at home, they could certainly take advantage of advanced cooling for their SSDs.
While a closed-loop LCS may seem like an overkill for a modern consumer-grade PCIe Gen 4 SSD (even the best and the fastest SSD), it may actually be useful for next-generation PCIe Gen 5 drives, as those SSD controllers can dissipate about 9W, so expect SSDs to be even hotter than that.
Meanwhile, SSDs that are designed for persistently high performance also need to provide decent endurance and in many cases, this is something that modern consumer-grade drives rarely offer these days.
But the massive dedicated liquid cooling system for an M.2 SSD may not be ideal for all systems. Many motherboards place M.2 slots near PCIe x16 slots for graphics cards that have rather massive cooling systems. Of course, LCS enthusiasts who would use a liquid-cooled SSD almost certainly use liquid cooling for graphics cards, but there are boards with hybrid cooling systems that feature dual-slot radiators which prevent installation of massive coolers on SSDs.
In any cases, TeamGroup's T-Force Cardea Liquid II drives are still in development, so it remains to be seen how the final drives will look and perform.
