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

Comparison Products

The TeamGroup GE Pro has some tough competition. We’re comparing it to some of our best drives, including the SanDisk WD Black SN8100 and Corsair MP700 Pro XT. Two other drives, which can be good at specific capacities, are the Crucial T710, with good 1TB specifications, and the Samsung 9100 Pro, which is currently the best value at 8TB. The Kingston Fury Renegade G5 is also expected in 8TB. We’re also looking at drives with newer hardware that are more budget-oriented. This includes the Adata XPG Mars 980 Blade and the DRAM-less Biwin Black Opal X570. We’ve also included something from the original batch of E26-based drives, the TeamGroup Cardea Z540, which would be most directly competitive with the GE Pro.

Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams. Future gaming benchmarks will be DirectStorage-inclusive and we also include notes about which drives may be future-proofed.

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The GE Pro has terrible results in 3DMark compared to the newer high-end PCIe 5.0 SSDs. This is okay as it’s not supposed to compete with those. We’d expect it to be on the level of the Z540 or Black Opal X570, instead, and it falls in between those two drives. For games, especially, this is still faster than PCIe 4.0 options.

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The results are particularly useful when analyzing drives for their use as primary/boot storage devices and in work environments.

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Unfortunately, the GE Pro performs even worse in PCMark 10. This makes it really difficult to recommend as a primary drive, although it’s still going to match or beat PCIe 4.0 SSDs. If you’re looking for a boot or OS drive in this segment, we wouldn’t go with the GE Pro unless it’s the least expensive option.

Console Testing — PlayStation 5 Transfers

The PlayStation 5 is capable of taking one additional PCIe 4.0 or faster SSD for extra game storage. While any 4.0 drive will technically work, Sony recommends drives that can deliver at least 5,500 MB/s of sequential read bandwidth for optimal performance. In our testing, PCIe 5.0 SSDs don’t bring much to the table and generally shouldn’t be used in the PS5, especially as they may require additional cooling. Check our Best PS5 SSDs article for more information.

Our testing utilizes the PS5’s internal storage test and manual read/write tests with over 192GB of data both from and to the internal storage. Throttling is prevented where possible to see how each drive operates under ideal conditions. While game load times should not deviate much from drive to drive, our results can indicate which drives may be more responsive in long-term use.

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This drive, like pretty much all the PCIe 5.0 drives we’ve tested, would be fine in the PS5. It’s not worth paying a premium for a faster drive here, though. One possible advantage of going PCIe 5.0 with the PS5 is that you can get a cool-running solution that could be even more efficient than very good PCIe 4.0 drives, but that’s not the case with the GE Pro. It’s simply not a good choice for this.

Transfer Rates — DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We write 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to the test drive, then make a copy of that data to a new folder, and follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file. This is a real world type workload that fits into the cache of most drives.

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The GE Pro’s copy performance is not bad, but it’s also not great. We expected it to beat the Black Opal X570 – which is a DRAM-less drive – but not the XPG Mars 980 Blade. The latter drive has DRAM and a newer controller, so it should beat the GE Pro, even though its flash is merely on par. This is especially strange as the E26-based Z540 handles itself just fine with comparable flash. When comparing equivalent flash, it’s natural to suspect that performance differences arise from the controller hardware.

These results help underline the fact that the hardware combination, that is, the controller-flash relationship, can be important when aiming for specific workloads. PCIe 5.0 drives are usually picked for their bandwidth potential, and in that case, you’re better off with older E26-based drives than some of the newer “budget” choices with what should be better controller tech. Phison has been particularly good about getting the most bandwidth out of its controllers. As prices swing upwards, older drives may become viable if you’re looking for a workload-specific solution, so it’s worth checking individual benchmarks like DiskBench.

Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes and at different queue depths for both sequential and random workloads.

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Starting with ATTO, the GE Pro has subdued read performance and plateaus after 256KiB or so for writes. This is disappointing performance for a drive of this caliber. This is reflected in CDM’s QD1 sequential results with reads, at just 4.66 GB/s, being terribly slow compared to the competition. This drive feels like a last-gen drive, even against some peers with equivalent era hardware. This is almost certainly due to the controller design, which isn’t really made for consumer workloads and synthetic benchmarks of this type. Enterprise drives usually don’t use a pSLC cache, for one, and this controller is also made with more flash channels in mind.

The good news, with that limitation in mind, is that random performance does not suffer as much. 4KB QD1 write latency is excellent, and the read latency is acceptable, matching drives like the 9100 Pro. This means that the GE Pro often feels quite responsive despite its overall sluggish design. Is it a drive we would recommend for the high-end user? Not really, as it feels like a shoehorned solution that doesn’t really do anything right. In most cases, you can find something better for your specific application. This drive is trying to do too much with too little, and this jerry-rigged mentality shines through in our testing. That said, it’s not catastrophically bad, either, so you could settle for it if market conditions favor it enough.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of pseudo-SLC (single-bit) programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC (three-bit) or QLC (four-bit) flash. Performance can suffer even more if the drive is forced to fold, which is the process of migrating data out of the cache in order to free up space for further incoming data.

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds. This process shows the performance of the drive in various states as well as the steady state write performance.

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The 2TB GE Pro writes in the fastest, temporary pSLC cache mode at 12.26 GB/s for over 54 seconds. The resultant 666GB cache is very large, nearing the limit for a drive of this size once the TLC flash is downsized to one-third its normal capacity. A large cache usually comes at the cost of post-cache or TLC mode performance, but the GE Pro actually does okay here. It manages around 2.58 GB/s in this mode, which isn’t bad at all. There’s no extreme drop-off as you see with QLC-based drives.

We know this flash can do better – we achieved almost 3.7 GB/s from the XPG Mars 980 Blade and have seen that and higher in the past – but not with such a large cache. The GE Pro does eventually find a folding mode where it’s forced to move data from the cache to native flash at around 1.8 GB/s. Folding is often a bit below half the flash’s potential speed, and the 1.8 GB/s while folding lines up with the 3.7 GB/s we see from other drives in a TLC mode. Within the context of write saturation testing, this means that the controller handles caching very well, and further, it doesn’t seem like the GE Pro uses lower-grade flash or other tricks to get more out of the memory. Coupled with our random 4KB results in CDM above this suggests nothing out of the ordinary with the drive’s hardware, and rather it emphasizes that where the drive performs poorly, it does as a result of the controller being designed for different workloads.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre stock storage. Desktops may be more performance-oriented with less support for power-saving features, so we show the worst-case.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption but performance-per-watt, or efficiency, is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

For temperature recording we currently poll the drive’s primary composite sensor during testing with a ~22°C ambient. Our testing is rigorous enough to heat the drive to a realistic ceiling temperature.

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The GE Pro is not power-efficient even by E26 standards, and it even draws more power for desktop idle than the notoriously bad E26. There’s bad, there’s Z540 E26-based bad, and then there’s GE Pro bad. The IG5666 controller is the culprit here, as we know the flash part of the equation. If this really is an enterprise controller repurposed for consumer drives, well, these results completely support such a conclusion and reveal why that approach is a bad idea.

That said, if you just want a powerful drive on a budget, something like the GE Pro could work in theory. You just shouldn’t expect the drive to be the fastest, the most efficient, or the most anything else, for that matter. It’s going to be passable, and that’s it. The price of the thing is the bottom line, and if you’re okay with that – we think a good hypothetical situation would be someone with a multi-slot PCIe 5.0 M.2 machine who just wants a PCIe 5.0 secondary gaming SSD – then this drive is acceptable even with this level of power consumption. This drive is not going to throttle with its heatsink – we didn’t even get within 20°C of that state – so if you have the space, it is workable. If you grab the version without a heatsink, we recommend an aftermarket cooling solution rather than the stock motherboard M.2 metal slabs.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

TeamGroup GE Pro Bottom Line

The TeamGroup GE Pro is not an easy SSD to score. It’s near or at the bottom within its own class of drives, but it’s faster than the last generation of PCIe 4.0 drives, and it’s currently the least expensive of its class. Its performance is inconsistent, but there are bright areas with its random performance and in our write saturation test. It’s very inefficient, but this isn’t a big deal with enthusiast desktops. It could run hot under some circumstances, but it comes with a very effective cooler.

With all this considered, the GE Pro is simply an average drive. Depending on your priorities, it could score higher or lower than that, but overall, it’s rather mediocre. We did give the Adata Legend 970 Pro a slightly higher score, but that was over a year ago, before we got several much better drives.

We’ll break down the current high-end PCIe 5.0 situation very quickly. If you’re looking for a drive that performs well even at 1TB, we recommend the Corsair MP700 Pro XT or, while supplies last, the Crucial T710. At 2TB and 4T,B the SanDisk WD Black SN8100 is probably still the best bet. The Samsung 9100 Pro remains the best value if you really need an 8TB drive. These are the best drives out there, but you can get less-expensive ones that get you nearly this level of performance. Drives like the Kingston Fury Renegade G5 are prime among them, and you can also drop down to ones with older flash, like the Adata XPG Mars 980 Blade or Acer GM9000. There are even DRAM-less options, such as the Biwin Black Opal X570, although these are rather low on the list. These last few drives are more of a budget option, but also work well as a second drive if you are capable of hosting two or more PCIe 5.0 drives in your system.

The price concerns are more serious with the current memory supply constraints. This may mean you have to compromise with one of the lower-end drives on the list. This includes the GE Pro, which is still plenty fast and is very usable if you’re aware of its strengths and weaknesses. PCIe 5.0 drives are very fast, and we’re not likely to see a lot of innovation in this space for a while. This drive can get you by, but more importantly, it’s not the worst choice for a non-primary drive if you want something fast for storage or games. It’s overkill, but the price differential from PCIe 4.0 to PCIe 5.0 might narrow over time, making that less of a consideration. We have to say this drive does look cool with its optional heatsink, too, so you could do worse.

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