TeamGroup MP44Q 2TB SSD Review: Another Budget Winner

TeamGroup is known for its affordable SSDs, so its new MP44Q joins a solid roster of budget SSDs. This is great for builders and upgraders who are willing to trim their budget when it comes to storage. The popular entry-level MP44L and the “one step up” MP44 now have a companion that fits in right between: the MP44Q. TeamGroup has courteously added a “Q” to the end to indicate QLC flash, which is known to be slower than the MP44L’s and MP44’s TLC, with lower endurance as well. However, there’s more to the story here: The MP44Q has surprisingly good performance, and it’s an inexpensive option for its entire capacity range, which helps one overlook the QLC flash.

The MP44Q also surprises with its excellent power efficiency and the relatively high endurance that's covered by the warranty – this isn’t your father’s QLC flash. In everyday usage, you might not even notice this is a budget drive, unless you engage the nemesis for all QLC-based drives: sustained write workloads. This weakness makes the MP44Q more suitable for use as a secondary drive for games or general data storage or for your PS5, although if you're on a strict budget, it’s good enough for primary storage on any desktop or laptop. The name of the game is capacity, though, and given current prices, that means the MP44Q is best suited for 2TB, something to carefully consider when shopping for a drive.

TeamGroup MP44Q Specifications

The TeamGroup MP44Q is available in capacities of 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB, priced at $59.99, $108.99, and $219.99, respectively. The 1TB and 2TB prices are not bad when considering the competition, but the 4TB price should come down a bit. The 4TB Sandisk WD_Black SN7100 is only $10 more at the time of review and has 3-bit TLC flash instead of 4-bit QLC like the MP44Q. To be fair, the 4TB QLC-based WD Blue SN5000 is at the same price as the MP44Q and has lower performance numbers, so it’s more about the WD_Black SN7100 being priced well. Still, we’d like to see this at least $10 cheaper.

The MP44Q is specified to reach up to 7,000/5,900 MB/s for sequential reads and writes at all three capacities, with IOPS not listed. Given the hardware, we would expect maximum IOPS to be about 1,000K / 800K for random reads and writes. TeamGroup backs the drive with a 5-year warranty with up to 500TB of writes per TB capacity. This is very high for QLC flash, but not unreasonably so. YMTC QLC is capable of high endurance on the order of 50% more than past QLC. If you’re looking for this level of endurance with a capacious drive on a budget – QLC should be less expensive than TLC – then the MP44Q is worth a look.

TeamGroup MP44Q Software and Accessories

TeamGroup’s software support is barebones. Its site does have an SSD S.M.A.R.T. Tool for download – we would recommend CrystalDiskInfo instead – as well as an NVMe driver and firmware updates for specific drives. We suggest never using any NVMe driver except the default Microsoft Windows one, unless you are running specific Solidigm drives like the P41 Plus. For cloning, imaging, and backup we recommend either MultiDrive for Windows or Clonezilla for bootable.

TeamGroup MP44Q: A Closer Look

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The TeamGroup MP44Q is a single-sided drive at all capacities, which is nice for systems where a double-sided drive might be problematic, like in most laptops. Single-sided drives can also be easier to cool with all the main components on an exposed side that can take a heatsink and/or thermal padding. The PCB is fairly standard with the “MAP1602” marking indicating it’s for drives using the Maxio MAP1602 SSD controller. This controller is a popular DRAM-less solution at the upper end of PCIe 4.0 speeds, making it a suitable fit for systems of all types.

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This controller has been around for a while and is tried-and-true, being competitive with the alternatives from Phison and Silicon Motion. Usually, we have tested it with TLC flash, but it works well with QLC, too. Check our HP FX700 review for more information on the hardware. We’ve included that drive for comparison in this review, but our previous review has fuller technical details. To quickly sum up the YMTC QLC flash being used, it performs comparably to Micron’s QLC of this generation, a fact which can be investigated more directly by following the Crucial P310 in our comparisons below. We’ve also reviewed the P310 in the M.2 2280 form factor, but the performance specifications are identical.

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