TeamGroup GE Pro 2TB SSD Review: A makeshift high-end SSD

It’s not every day you get to review a high-end drive based on an InnoGrit SSD controller, but the TeamGroup GE Pro 2TB SSD comes armed with this silicon. Phison SSD controllers have ruled the roost for a while, and only recently has SMI returned to claim the throne with its revamped controllers. InnoGrit, in the past, has been behind some of our favorite drives, especially budget drives, but things get a little bit tougher when you’re pushing PCIe 5.0 levels of bandwidth. The GE Pro is TeamGroup’s attempt to rein in unbridled, enterprise levels of power into something that makes sense inside your desktop. Throw on a giant heatsink, and what’s not to love?

As it turns out, quite a lot. While enterprise SSD hardware overlapping with consumer isn’t anything new, being not uncommon in the distant past and more recently with Phison’s early PCIe 5.0 steps and its E26 controller, there are certain compromises you want to avoid. Consumer drives need pSLC caches and need to handle bursty workloads more than sustained ones. They also don’t need access to most enterprise features. To fulfill these changes, fine-tuning of hardware and firmware is required. This is especially true when dealing with consumer and lower grades of flash, usually with less over-provisioning. The GE Pro’s choice in controller brings this into full relief as the IG5666 has enterprise origins with what feels like less refinement than the Phison E26.

The good news is that the GE Pro is still a full-fledged PCIe 5.0 with high levels of performance. The bad news is that it’s not as consistent, and it consumes a lot of power. The latter was an issue with the E26, too, and the GE Pro optionally comes with an effective heatsink. These drives are meant to be used on desktops where a few watts of power here and there aren’t a big concern. It’s also true that PCIe 5.0 drives are all about pushing lots of bandwidth with less emphasis on random performance, so the GE Pro is at least passable for the former and isn’t bad with the latter. Still, this is a drive you would probably only want as a second or third drive in your powerful system, and it would be picked only for its relatively low price.

TeamGroup GE Pro Specifications

The TeamGroup GE Pro is made to be available at 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB. What a drive is made to be available at isn’t always what it actually is available at, and this also applies to the GE Pro. We only found the drive at 2TB and 4TB on the market at the time of review. 8TB has always been a difficult capacity to reach for high-end drives, and that’s likely to be even more true with the current NAND flash shortage. And, to be frank, a drive like this is unlikely to be a priority for 8TB of flash, and it’s not very fast at 1TB either, so the available capacities are the most viable ones.

We have reviewed the 8TB version of Samsung’s 9100 Pro, and we expect SanDisk’s WD Black SN8100 to be available soon. 8TB will also be available using the same SMI SM2508 controller with the Kingston Fury Renegade G5, but whether any of these SKUs will stay in stock or be affordable remains to be seen. Phison’s E28 controller can also handle 8TB of flash, and our expectations after the Corsair MP700 Pro XT review are that it would be amazing, but we’ll have to wait a bit longer to see. The GE Pro uses an earlier generation InnoGrit controller instead – the IG5666 that we reviewed with the Adata Legend 970 Pro – which is much closer to the Phison E26, although we did not review either platform at 8TB.

For smaller, more popular capacities, the GE Pro is being sold at $219.99 and $359.99 currently, which isn’t bad pricing at all. In fact, these are the lowest prices out there for a drive of this caliber at the time of review. Our caveat is that the drive is not widely available, and, as an aside, prices are changing rapidly for all drives. However, it’s safe to say that price is the one thing this drive has going for it.

Performance isn’t terrible with a maximum of 14,000 / 13,800 MB/s for sequential reads and writes. The drive’s performance is weak at 1TB, even more so than other high-end drives with dense flash, so we recommend avoiding that SKU. The GE Pro does not explicitly list IOPS, but we know the theoretical maximum is at 2M IOPS or more, up to as much as 3M, but we would expect closer to 1,800K / 1,300K random read and write IOPS, as with the Adata Legend 970 Pro. This is competitive but no longer fast by today’s standards. The warranty is also standard at five years with up to 600TB of writes per TB capacity.

TeamGroup GE Pro Software and Accessories

TeamGroup’s drives do come with some software support. The first download is the SSD S.M.A.R.T. Tool, which is a mini-toolbox with drive and system information as well as a tab for performance testing. Separately, the GE Pro has a firmware update tool for download to apply any necessary fixes. In most cases, this should be all that you need, as SSDs are relatively simple devices to maintain.

TeamGroup GE Pro: A Closer Look

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One thing stands out immediately, and that is, of course, the tall heatsink with active cooling. If you have the vertical room to fit an SSD with a heatsink like this – it might not be possible in some slots, especially ones near your GPU – then you’re probably more worried about the fan. Small fans are noisy and notoriously unreliable. This was also a concern with the original crop of E26-based drives, as active cooling was recommended for proper operation. In fact, active cooling was never a requirement, but it does help keep the drive cooler, and in certain environments, it might be needed to prevent throttling. In our experience, the IG5666 controller on the GE Pro runs even hotter than the E26, and we’ll dig into why a bit below. Luckily, TeamGroup’s cooling solution is more than adequate for any SSD.

What we want to touch on here, lastly, is that you could run without the fan or even remove the heatsink to utilize your own cooling solution. Just be aware that this drive will require significant cooling of some sort if you want to avoid throttling.

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These pictures are a bit more interesting. We see that this is a double-sided drive – this is generally a negative, but with a drive like this, which requires cooling, it’s less of a factor, with a controller, DRAM, and multiple NAND flash packages. The DRAM is DDR4 for SK hynix, which is perfectly fine for the role volatile memory plays on an SSD. This memory is used for metadata, address mapping in particular, where latency is more important than bandwidth. However, using more efficient memory like LPDDR4X may reduce power draw by a small amount. The NAND flash packages are labeled in such a way that we know it’s YMTC TLC flash. Each one has “04Tb” in the coding for 4Tb or 512GB, making for a total of 2TB for the entire drive.

The GE Pro’s controller is the InnoGrit IG5666, which is not one we see that often. It’s worth extra discussion. The controller is a 12nm part – so, more like the E26 than the 6nm E28 or SM2508 – which right off the bat means it’s going to run hotter. It’s an eight-channel controller with DRAM that takes flash up to 2,400 MT/s, which, again, is similar to the E26, and also indicates to us that the flash here will be 232-Layer. Such flash is starting to feel dated, but it’s still plenty fast for current storage applications. So far, so good, you could select this drive over any E26 option if it’s priced lower and the flash on some SM2508 drives – the Acer Predator GM9000 and Adata XPG Mars 980 Blade come to mind – is comparable to the GE Pro’s. So, it’s not the worst drive around, but there are reasons to be cautious about buying it, which we will get into here.

The first thing to realize is that InnoGrit doesn’t have the best track record. We loved the IG5236 when it first came out, see our Adata XPG Gammix S70 review, but the controller had reliability issues during its tenure. The entry-level IG5220, see our HP FX900 review for more, was also fantastic when it came out, but later on, it became paired with questionable flash, which reduced InnoGrit’s status among controller makers in many eyes. It often shares a space with TenaFe and Realtek controllers, which are most often chosen to cut costs while providing, in general, a lesser overall experience. This adds some concern about the GE Pro even before we dig into its specific hardware.

So what about the IG5666? Our original review with it wasn’t too gripping, as we expected more from InnoGrit. Now, however, we have more information and can discuss why. One tactic used by controller makers is to have double-purpose silicon, for example, Phison using enterprise IP in its E26. Samsung, for another, will sometimes have its controllers in a parallel enterprise line, like the PM9A3 sharing a controller with the 980 Pro and newer 970 EVO Plus revisions. InnoGrit also does this with the IG5666, as it’s the client partner to the enterprise IG5669, and this connection explains why the IG5666 is so inefficient and runs so hot.

The IG5669 is a 16/18-channel controller with an 11-core, RISC-V design. RISC-V is not unknown in this space, but ARM chips are much more common. Phison does use custom RISC-V coprocessors in its E26 and E28, to good effect, but the primary cores are still ARM Cortex-R5. SMI uses Cortex-R8 with Cortex-M0 in the SM2508 – Cortex-M series cores also show up in other controllers, including those by TenaFe and Marvell – and using a full RISC-V solution is drastic for a client drive. Further, while five or six core solutions are typical, eleven cores are extreme and clearly only needed for an enterprise drive where eight channels of flash aren’t enough. The IG5666 is only using eight channels, but even with a cut-down design, the inefficiencies remain. That’s why it runs so hot and falls short of hitting its full potential.

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