Everyone loves a fast Gen 5 SSD, just not the prices associated with it. They still have too much of a price premium over Gen 4 drives. But as supply increases, the gap is slowly starting to close. The key word there is slow.
At $269, the Teamgroup Z540 2TB PCIe Gen 5 SSD is certainly a fast drive, with maximum read and write transfer speeds of 12,400 MB/s and 11,800 MB/s respectively, but it’s priced at over $100+ more than worth a Gen 4 drive? while there is little tangible benefit to today’s gaming PCs?
Still, that $269 price means it’s one of the more affordable Gen 5 SSDs, especially compared to the first generation Gen 5 drives around the 10,000 MB/s range. And it stacks up very well against the $400 Nextstorage X Series 2TB drive that our man Jacob recently reviewed, even though the NN5Pro model comes with a bundled heatsink.
Together with the Z540 SSD, Teamgroup also sent the T-Force Dark Airflow 1 SSD cooler for this review. It is available separately and is a recommended purchase if you have a motherboard that does not have integrated heat sinks. It’s reasonably priced at $27, although it wasn’t available in the UK or Australian markets at the time of writing.
T-Force Z540 2TB Specifications
Capacity: 2TB
Couple: PCIe 5.0 x4
Memory controller: Phison PS5026-E26 controller
Flash memory: Micron 232L TLC NAND
Rated performance: 12,400 MB/s continuous read, 11,800 MB/s continuous write
Stamina: 1400TBW
Guarantee: Five years
Price: $269 | £274 | AU$515
The Z540 is available in capacities of 1TB, 2TB and 4TB. I have the 2TB version on hand. Teamgroup promotes the Z540 as a drive for gamers, but the Z540 will happily serve as an all-purpose drive, with a five-year warranty and 1400 TBW endurance.
The Teamgroup Z540 is a PCIe 5.0 x4 M.2 2280 NVMe SSD. It’s rated for up to 12,400 MB/s sequential reads and 11,800 MB/s writes for the 2TB version I have. That’s the same as the 4TB version, although the 1TB version is slightly slower at 11,700 MB/s and 9,500 MB/s.
Like many currently available Gen 5 drives, this one includes the Phison E26 controller, 232-layer Micron NAND, and 4GB Hynix DDR4-4266 cache.
The drive ships with a thin graphene strip, although this is not attached and will not be needed if you install it under a heat sink on the motherboard with a suitable thermal pad. All Gen 5 SSDs get hot when you shuffle a lot of data, so it’s imperative that your motherboard has some sort of integrated cooling solution. If not, it’s definitely worth spending some extra money on a model with an integrated heat sink, or an aftermarket cooler like the Dark Airflow 1.
The Dark Airflow 1 is a nice looking little device, I think. At 105mm tall, it’s not overly tall and thin enough not to interfere with my system’s adjacent graphics card. It contains a small fan that I initially connected to a fan header at full speed. And boy was it noisy! But that’s not a problem, because it’s a PWM model that can be easily adjusted in your motherboard’s BIOS. I found that setting it to 20% lowered the noise level to a point where it can no longer be heard through the rest of the system.
The Z540 has an optional SSD SMART tool that you can download from the Teamgroup website. It contains basic disk and system information and the CrystalDiskMark benchmark. It’s not as visually appealing as the software suites from the likes of WD or Samsung and I’d like to see some sort of drive cloning tool, but in my testing the Teamgroup app worked well.
The Z540 performed almost exactly as we would expect from a Phison E26-equipped drive. It’s pretty much on par with the much more expensive Nextorage 2TB drive, while costing more than 30% less, or 25% less if you include the cost of the optional Dark I Airflow cooler.
I’m happy to give up an intangible portion of SSD performance to keep $100 or more in my pocket that I could spend on a faster GPU that will deliver a really noticeable performance boost.
The fastest Gen 5 SSDs aren’t critical for gamers compared to a good Gen 4 option.
Somewhat curiously, Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers’ loading time was slower than I expected. That could be due to the vagaries of Windows doing some random things in the background during the test, but a second and third test produced similar results. I can live with the loss of half a second of loading time. That kind of difference is an example of why the fastest Gen 5 SSDs aren’t critical for gamers compared to a good Gen 4 option.
I was pleasantly surprised by the effectiveness of the Dark Airflow I cooler. Small coolers with small fans are generally undesirable, but if the fan speed is set properly, it is truly quiet. And it’s effective too, as it delivers the lowest peak temperatures I’ve seen in a Gen 5 SSD to date.
As time goes by, we expect the price of the latest and greatest PC hardware to drop in price. Frustratingly, Gen 5 SSDs haven’t dropped as much as we’d hoped so far. It’s fine to expect to pay a premium price for the best hardware, but in the case of Gen 5 SSDs, the fair real-world gains aren’t clear enough to justify their cost. Sure, if you’re scrambling terabytes of files together they’re worth it, but I’d say a typical gamer doesn’t do that too often.
That said, at $260, the Teamgroup Z540 is one of the cheaper Gen 5 drives, and a top performer too. If you have a high-spec system, paying extra for a powerful SSD is justified. If you’re willing to pay, you’ll be rewarded with performance that’s pretty much on par with the best SSDs on the market.
If you’re willing to pay, you’ll be rewarded with performance that’s pretty much on par with the best SSDs on the market.
Like all Gen 5 drives we’ve tested so far, they can run hot without proper cooling. Modern motherboard SSD cooling has come a long way since the days of simple metal plates. Enthusiastic motherboards have very good SSD cooling with a lot of cooling surface, and in that case you do not need to purchase a cooler such as the Dark Airflow I. However, if your motherboard is lacking in that area, a small cooler is worth the investment.
In the long term, the price of the Teamgroup Z540 will decrease. We’ll see 14 GB/s drives, new controllers, improved NAND flash, and competition from big players like Samsung and Western Digital. With the increased competition, the price of Gen 5 SSDs will certainly become a lot more attractive. But for now, unless you have a high-spec system, a much cheaper Gen 4 drive makes more sense for a gaming system.
The tide is turning so slowly. I don’t see it being too long before a Gen 5 drive like the Teamgroup Z540 adds good value to its very good performance. Knock down $50 and we’re almost there. If/when that happens, it will be a contender for a spot on our list of the best gaming SSDs.