The TeamGroup NV5000 is built in the M.2 Type-2280 “gumstick” form factor, which is common among today’s internal SSDs. It employs the NVMe protocol over its PCIe 4.0 bus. (Baffled by some of these terms? Check out our glossary of SSD terminology.)
The NV5000 is a four-lane PCI Express (PCIe) 4.0 drive that utilizes 3D NAND flash memory. The NV5000 lacks a dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) cache, relying on the computer’s own memory (host memory buffer, or HMB) instead. The DRAM-less architecture helps keep this SSD’s price down. Although TeamGroup doesn’t specify the NV5000’s controller, the company’s previous DRAM-less SSDs, such as the MP44Q, utilize MaxioTech DRAM-free controllers and NAND flash from YMTC. TeamGroup says that different production batches of the NV5000 may utilize various controllers and NAND flash components, and the company declined to provide more specific component details. This box-of-chocolates approach may help keep costs down, but it raises questions around the consistency of the drive’s performance from sample to sample.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
On the top surface of the NV5000, you will find TeamGroup’s familiar heat-dissipating graphene label, which is less than 1mm thick and runs the full length of an M.2 2280 SSD. It is a heat spreader, reducing operating temperature by delivering the heat throughout the top surface of the SSD; otherwise, it would remain concentrated around the drive’s controller and NAND chips, where a buildup of heat could damage the components or trigger thermal throttling. The latter is a safety mechanism that slows down the drive (and thus reduces performance) to tamp down the heat when a certain temperature is reached. We still recommend, in the case of PCI Express 4.0 and PCI Express 5.0 SSDs—even ones with thin heat spreaders like this —that they be coupled with a full-fledged M.2 heatsink, either a third-party unit or the one provided with most late-model desktop computers’ motherboards.
The NV5000 comes in 1TB and 2TB capacities. It is priced similarly to inexpensive DRAM-less SSDs (many of which come in capacities of up to 4TB) that are currently in vogue.
The NV5000’s durability ratings, expressed in terms of lifetime write capacity in total terabytes written (TBW), are low for an internal SSD. They are similar to those we see with many SSDs with QLC NAND, and below the 600TBW and 1,200TBW ratings, for 1TB and 2TB, respectively, of the Crucial T500, Crucial P5 Plus, Samsung SSD 990 Pro, and WD Black SN850X, all of which are TLC NAND-based.
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(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The TBW spec is an estimate, according to the manufacturer, of how much data can be written to a drive before some cells begin to fail and get taken out of service. (TBW tends to scale 1:1 with capacity, as it does in this case.) The NV5000 is under warranty for three years or until you hit the rated TBW figure in writes, whichever comes first, though it is unlikely that you would write enough data to the drive in less than three years to hit its TBW mark.
