TeamGroup NV5000 2TB SSD Review: A Blast from the Past

Comparison Products

The NV5000 has a wide range of affordable competitors, but with growing price tags, the differences between them have become more important. On paper, this drive is very similar to TeamGroup’s MP44L, especially now that the MP44L is becoming less picky about its hardware. From here, you could go down to QLC flash with the Crucial P3 Plus or laterally to the popular WD Blue SN580 and WD Black SN770. These last two have TLC flash and perform somewhat similarly; more importantly, they are reliable. Samsung’s 990 EVO is meant to compete with them, and it shows up in an OEM form in many prebuilts, but in our testing, it was quite underwhelming.

Above these but with still a budget lean is the Kingston NV3, a drive that fills an interesting gap between the 5 GB/s drives listed so far and the higher-end budget solutions that hit the full speed of the PCIe 4.0 interface. These include the Lexar NM790, broadly found with Chinese hardware, and the Sabrent Rocket 4 using Phison and Kioxia hardware. At or near the same price, it’s a safe bet to go with them over the slower drives, but availability issues for flash are rapidly changing the landscape. Some of these drives might disappear or swap hardware just to keep going.

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 NV5000 delivers pretty meager results in 3DMark, losing even to the QLC-based P3 Plus. However, the bandwidth is sufficient for what most games demand – any HDD is significantly worse – and even modern games requiring an SSD should be more than fine. The performance could be an issue with future titles, but the baseline performance is significantly better than that of SATA SSDs, which generally qualify for that category.

NVMe SSDs also have lower latency than SATA, and even the relatively poor result we see here is on par with the Kingston NV2, which, through its lifespan, has been a passable drive. Some titles might load slightly slower on a drive like this, but it’s more than adequate for gaming if that’s your primary intent.

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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PCMark 10 performance is also dismal, but we reiterate that this is still delivering an experience superior to any HDD or SATA SSD. Our testing is under ideal circumstances, so performance may vary under certain conditions, such as if the drive were 95% full. If you’re using this drive to upgrade an old machine that will see light usage, your experience will be perfectly fine. On the other hand, if you’re an enthusiast who really works a high-end system, it’s probably worth paying more for your primary drive.

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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While the NV5000 does not meet Sony’s 5,500 MB/s criteria at any capacity, the drive will absolutely work in the console. Its performance is certainly not among the best, but it should deliver a satisfactory experience. It’s not even a bad budget choice. However, we would recommend adding some form of cooling for the drive, preferably a PS5-compliant heatsink.

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 NV5000 surprised in DiskBench. Its overall performance is satisfactory, and it beats some budget favorites, the MP44L and P3 Plus, and even Samsung’s 990 EVO. We think the 990 EVO Plus is a much better drive than the regular EVO, and this is one reason why. The NV5000 has copy performance pretty close to two more budget favorites, the Black SN770 and Blue SN580, which makes it at least “okay” in our book. Drives aren’t just about static storage; they’re about movement, and nobody wants a slow drive when they have to move a ton of stuff. Sure, the drive isn’t super fast, but it beats even good PCIe 3.03 drives, so if you’re working with or moving older data, this is probably fast enough.

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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The results we see for ATTO with this drive are, surprisingly, not that bad. Aside from a minor drop at 512KB for reads, the drive has pretty consistent performance curves. However, its read performance – and we consider read performance to be more important than write – is near or at the bottom within the same ballpark as the NV3 or 990 EVO at their worst. We’ve already hinted before that we think the 990 EVO is undergassed, and the NV3, which has QLC flash and is designed for an ultra-budget role like the NV5000, is a relatively low bar to beat.

It’s probably best to look at CrystalDiskMark’s sequential read performance for QD1 to get a confirmed feel for real-world performance. There, the drive continues to fall under the NV3 but beats the P3 Plus and MP44L. Honestly, this isn’t that bad of a result, although we would never pick it for anything other than price savings.

4K read and write performance is also pretty poor, and, with reads still being more important than writes, the NV5000 only manages to best the QLC-based P3 Plus. This isn’t too terrible, as the P3 Plus was a popular budget drive for its time, specifically for storage and gaming. The NV5000’s performance in comparison is also adequate for these roles. When you have drives like the NV3 being close to the excellent NM790, it helps put things into perspective – even relatively slow drives like the NV5000 are equal to or better than good PCIe 3.0 drives. Considering this hardware feels so much like a high-end PCIe 3.0 drive, that’s not surprising, although you do get the benefit of extra bandwidth with the drive’s 4.0 link.

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 NV5000 writes at over 5 GB/s for greater than 148 seconds in its fastest, single-bit pSLC mode. This nearly 750GB cache is monumentally large. Because the drive is converting its 3-bit TLC flash into 1-bit SLC, the cache size will be, at the maximum, approximately one-third the size of the drive. We say approximately because, for one, you must consider any decimal/binary conversion, and two, the actual amount of flash on the drive exceeds what is visible to the host and user. Even with these factors in mind, the cache is larger than expected, which potentially indicates the drive is copying a significant amount of data to the TLC flash while it is in the pSLC mode. The cache will be effectively larger as a result, at the cost of write consistency.

This is pretty obvious when we look at post-cache performance. Writing becomes inconsistent with speeds going all over the place as the drive is trying to move data over, which can force it to slow down in a so-called folding state, while dealing with further incoming data. The drive simultaneously wants to increase performance to the direct-to-TLC and pSLC states when possible, so the end effect is a jagged write response. The drive does, however, write at an average of 432 MB/s, which actually exceeds the SN770’s speed. We’re not at all shocked by the performance trade-off here, as budget drives tend to rely on massive pSLC caches to hide poor performance states.

It’s a little more difficult to have expectations beyond that because this specific flash isn’t generally used on PCIe 4.0 drives. A potential competitor, such as a drive based on the Phison E16 like the original Sabrent Rocket 4, will be using Kioxia’s 96-Layer BiCS4 flash instead. Micron’s flash is faster per die with twice the planes, and this extra bandwidth could help the NV5000 maintain a reasonable average post-cache speed while still having the largest cache possible. This is in “what if” territory because we simply haven’t reviewed a drive like this before. It’s a little more exotic and, as a result, performs uniquely.

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 NV5000, as anticipated, is not an efficient drive. It’s near the bottom of the list but, somehow, manages to just beat out the 990 EVO. This says more about the 990 EVO than the NV5000, in our opinion – the former is a drive that always felt rushed out to us. Luckily, even this low level of efficiency isn’t all that bad, as it still beats most PCIe 3.0 drives. In a PCIe 3.0 slot, the NV5000 would probably be competitive with all drives not named the Gold P31. This does mean the drive is fine for older PCs – even ones with PCIe 2.0 M.2 slots or PCIe ports, and/or those with only two lanes – and as a secondary drive in newer ones. It’s not our first choice for a laptop, but things could be worse.

Speaking of worse, does this drive run really hot? In our testing, no, with a maximum recorded temperature of 55°C. We chalk this up to a couple of factors. The first is surface area. This controller is larger than its four-channel counterparts, and the lack of DRAM works in its favor. It’s also still got four NAND flash packages for even more surface area. The second factor is that this controller is capable of running faster and with faster flash. At a lower MT/s, it’s going to pull less power. Lastly, we test temperature with our write test, but there are workloads that will get the drive hotter. This drive seems to run relatively well with writes within its pSLC cache, which might not be the full workout it is for other hardware configurations.

So, although we are pleasantly surprised, we would still advise you to monitor real-world temps for this drive in your own system. A heatsink probably won’t hurt, but the heatspreading graphene label did get the job done in our testing.

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 NV5000 Bottom Line

The TeamGroup NV5000 is one of the worst drives we’ve tested in recent years, and yet, encouragingly, it still provides more than what some people need. Its low score reflects that it has mostly poor performance and power efficiency compared to other drives on the market. In comparison to PCIe 3.0 drives, however, it’s actually not bad. It provides an adequate experience on the PS5 and would work great as a storage or games drive. Realistically, this doesn’t sound like a bad option to have with so many others pushing numbers that almost no user will ever see.

Let’s look at the downsides. The drive only has a 3-year warranty, which, to be fair, used to be much more common. 5 years is much nicer, but it isn’t a strict requirement. The drive also has poor power efficiency for its generation, but surprisingly matches the 990 EVO and can beat most PCIe 3.0 drives. It also has relatively poor performance, but can beat any PCIe 3.0 and even with its massive cache, the steady state write speed is also above the average PCIe 3.0 drive. This is good news because it means there is a possibility for an affordable drive that is practical but not awe-inspiring. It’s also bad news because this might become more common as NAND flash stocks diminish and options thin out.

Normally, we would throw a lot of direct comparisons your way to help you navigate the market. Right now, this drive would be an okay compromise at a low price, but it’s not one we would recommend if you’re buying a drive that has to be reliable. Even just stepping up to the SN580 or SN770 would be a good call if you care about your data. We always recommend backups and a data rescue plan, but there is such a thing as introducing additional risk. While we have no hard evidence that says the NV5000 will be less reliable, commonly, the use of mixed and older hardware comes with additional risks due to firmware and hardware combination quirks. If your use is basic, such as using it for a PS5 drive, this risk probably isn’t as noteworthy.

So, this drive feels most like a last-second cart addition on sale when you need a cheap 2TB SSD for a random budget build. Or an upgrade. Or a project, or a console, or whatever. It’s an SSD that won’t burn down your house or throttle like an HDD. It’s a step up over SATA and uses hardware from the PCIe 3.0 days, back when we really started to have a better selection of drives. Sometimes that’s all you need, and that’s okay. It’s just not going to win awards from us, especially at its current pricing.