by Everyone loves fast Gen 5 SSDs, but not the prices that come with them. They still carry 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 slowly.
At $269, the Teamgroup Z540 2TB PCIe Gen 5 SSD is certainly a fast drive, with peak read and write transfer rates of 12,400 MB/s and 11,800 MB/s respectively, but is the $100+ price premium over a Gen 4 drive worth it when few tangible advantages for today’s gaming PCs?
However, that $269 price means it’s one of the more affordable Gen 5 SSDs, especially compared to first-wave Gen 5 drives around the 10,000MB/s range. And, it stacks up very well against the $400 Nextstorage X Series 2TB drive that our guy Jacob recently reviewed, even though the NN5Pro model comes with a bundled heatsink.
Along with the Z540 SSD, Team Group also sent its 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 include integrated heatsinks. It’s pretty fair 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
Interface: PCIe 5.0 x4
Memory controller: Phison PS5026-E26 controller
Flash memory: Micron 232L TLC NAND
Rated performance: 12,400 MB/s sustained read, 11,800 MB/s sustained write
Durability: 1400 TBW
Warranty: Five years
Price: $269 | £274 | $515
The Z540 is available in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities. I have the 2TB version in hand. Teamgroup promotes the Z540 as a drive for gamers, but the Z540 will be happy as an all-purpose drive, with a five-year warranty and a 1400 TBW durability rating.
The Teamgroup Z540 is a PCIe 5.0 x4 M.2 2280 NVMe SSD. It’s rated at up to 12,400 MB/s sequential reads and 11,800 MB/s writes for my 2TB version. That’s the same as the 4TB version, although the 1TB version comes in a bit slower at 11,700 MB/s and 9,500 MB/s.
Like many Gen 5 drives currently available, it incorporates the Phison E26 controller, 232-layer Micron NAND and includes 4GB of Hynix DDR4-4266 cache.
The drive as shipped includes a thin graphene strip, although it is not attached and will not be necessary if you are installing it under a motherboard heatsink with an appropriate thermal pad. All Gen 5 SSDs get hot when you’re moving 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 a few extra dollars on a model with an integrated heatsink, or an aftermarket cooler like the Dark Airflow 1.
I think the Dark Airflow 1 is a nice little device. It’s not too big at 105mm tall and is thin enough not to interfere with my system’s graphics card next to it. It includes a small fan that I originally installed into a full speed fan header. And he was a boy loud! But that’s not a problem because it’s a PWM model that’s easily adjustable in your motherboard’s BIOS. I found that reducing it to 20% reduced its noise level to a point where it can’t be heard over the rest of the system.
The Z540 has an optional SSD SMART tool that you can get from the Teamgroup website. It includes basic drive 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 disk cloning tool included, but in my testing, the Teamgroup app worked well.
The Z540 performed pretty much as we would expect from a Phison E26 equipped drive. It’s all on par with the much more expensive Nextorage 2TB drive, and costs over 30% less, or 25% less if you factor in the cost of the optional Dark I Airflow cooler.
I’m more than happy to give up an intangible fraction of SSD performance to keep $100 or more in my pocket that I could allocate to a faster GPU, which will provide a truly significant performance boost.
The fastest Gen 5 SSDs aren’t critical for gamers compared to a good Gen 4 option.
A little strangely, the 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 the second and third tests yielded similar results. I can live with losing half a second of loading time. That kind of difference right there 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 efficiency of the Dark Airflow I cooler. Small coolers with small fans are usually undesirable, but when the fan speed is set appropriately, it is very quiet. And it’s efficient too, delivering the lowest peak temperatures I’ve seen in a Gen 5 SSD to date.
As time goes on, we expect the latest and greatest PC hardware to drop in price. Frustratingly so far, Gen 5 SSDs haven’t dropped as much as we’d hoped. It’s nice to expect to pay a premium price for the best hardware, but in the case of a Gen 5 SSD, the real-world gains in terms of honesty aren’t clear enough to justify their cost. Sure, if you shuffle terabytes of files around they’re worth it, but I’d say it’s not a typical gamer to do that too often.
That said, at $260, the Teamgroup Z540 is one of the cheapest Gen 5 drives, and it’s also one of the best performing. If you have a high-spec system, paying extra for a high-performance SSD is justified. If you’re willing to pay, you’ll be rewarded with performance unmatched by the best SSDs on the market.
If you’re willing to pay, you’ll be rewarded with performance unmatched by the best SSDs on the market.
Like all Gen 5 drives we’ve tested so far, they can get hot without proper cooling. Modern motherboard SSD cooling has come a long way since the days of simple metal plates. Enthusiast motherboards with a lot of heatsink surface area have very good SSD cooling, in which case you won’t need to buy a cooler like the Dark Airflow I. However, if your motherboard is lacking in that area, a small cooler is well worth it. the investment.
Over time, the price of the Teamgroup Z540 will drop. We will see 14 GB/s drives, new controllers, improved NAND flash and competition from the big guns like Samsung and Western Digital. With increased competition, the price of Gen 5 SSDs will definitely become much stronger. 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 ever so slowly. I can’t see it being too long before a Gen 5 drive like the Teamgroup Z540 adds good value to its very good performance. Knock $50 off 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.
