T-Force Cardea Ceramic C440 M.2 PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSD Review-February 2024-www.yitit.com

Product Info

T-Force Cardea Ceramic C440

Type

NVMe SSD

Price

$189.99

When NVMe makers decide to cool down their drives they either say good luck or strap a large aluminum heat-sink to it, but T-Force shuffles things up with the use of ceramic! No, they're not making pottery here but a good ceramic material acts as a good conductor of heat so it makes sense, and if you're doing a white build this will fit right in! But is the ceramic-sinked T-Force Cardea C440 all it's cracked up to be? Let's dig in.

First Look At T-Force Cardea Ceramic C440 – Unboxing And Closer Look

The blister pack for the T-Force Cardea C440 isn't quite as premium as the product inside, but it's simple, effective, and cuts back on waste. The front has the pertinent nomenclature to make it clear what model and capacity you're looking at. We received the 1TB for this review but it is available in a 2TB flavor. Flipping things over to the back we're treated to the actual information of what you're buying. Offering up the usual marketing material we also find listed Crystal Disk Mark performance metrics for the 1TB and 2TB model in reads/writes bost sequential and IOPS. Kudos for giving customers information on what they're getting right there on the package.

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The drive itself if of the typical affair, and just like the Cardea II we're served up the unfortunate blue PCB. That would be worse if it was a bare drive, but it's covered on the outward-facing side with a beautiful white ceramic heatsink marked in gold letters. The backside that you won't see has your usual nomenclature.

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T-Force Cardea C440 Lineup

Capacity	1TB, 2TB
Interface	PCIe Gen 4x4 NVMe 1.3
Controller	Phison E16
DRAM/Memory	DDR4/Kioxia 96L TLC
Performance Read Peak	up to 5,000 MB/s
Performance Write Peak	up to 4,400 MB/s
IOPS Read Peak	750K
IOPS Write Peak	750K
Meantime Between Failure	1,700,000 hours
Warranty	5 Year

Testing Setup

Our test bench is now using the Ryzen 9 3900X on the ASUS TUF Gaming X570 Pro-WiFi so that now we have access to be able to take PCIe Gen 4 drives into account. We have the Ryzen 9 3900X clocked at 4.3GHz all core with the Hyper X Predator DDR4 3600 CL17. Before starting the tests I loaded the NVMe drive up to 60% capacity so that the testing would not be run on a clean empty drive.

Component	Model
CPU	AMD Ryzen 9 3900X @ 4.3GHz All Core
Motherboard	ASUS TUF Gaming X570 Pro-WiFi
Memory	Hyper X Predator 2x16GB (32GB) 3600MHz CL17
PSU	Cooler Master V1200P
OS	Windows 10-64 Bit
GPU	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE
Case	Lian Li T70X

T-Force Cardea Ceramic C440

ATTO Disk Benchmark

As the industry’s leading provider of high-performance storage & network connectivity products, ATTO has created a widely-accepted Disk Benchmark freeware software to help measure storage system performance. As one of the top tools utilized in the industry, Disk Benchmark identifies performance in hard drives, solid-state drives, RAID arrays as well as the host connection to attached storage. Top drive manufacturers, like Hitachi, build and test every drive using the ATTO Disk Benchmark.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host bus adapters (HBAs), hard drives, and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

ATTO Write

512B

1KB

2KB

4KB

8KB

16KB

32KB

64KB

128KB

256KB

512KB

1MB

2MB

4MB

8MB

700

1400

2100

2800

3500

4200

700

1400

2100

2800

3500

4200

T-Force Cardea Gen4 40

162

347

603

1.1k

2.2k

3.6k

3.9k

3.8k

Silicon Power Gen4 1TB 51

101

194

401

774

1.5k

2.8k

3.7k

3.9k

HP EX950 1TB NVMe 65

142

285

556

1.7k

2.3k

2.5k

2.7k

2.8k

Kingston KC2500 1TB NVMe 68

135

278

547

982

1.6k

2.2k

2.4k

2.5k

2.6k

Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB NVMe 75

148

288

552

1.2k

2.2k

2.9k

WD Black SN750 1TB NVMe 11

645

1.2k

1.9k

2.7k

2.8k

ATTO Read

512B

1KB

2KB

4KB

8KB

16KB

32KB

64KB

128KB

256KB

512KB

1MB

2MB

4MB

8MB

1000

2000

3000

4000

5000

6000

1000

2000

3000

4000

5000

6000

T-Force Cardea Gen4 43

168

357

663

1.4k

2.5k

2.8k

4.6k

5.3k

5.2k

Silicon Power Gen4 1TB 46

185

424

834

1.6k

2.5k

2.8k

4.5k

5.3k

5.2k

5.1k

HP EX950 1TB NVMe 75

150

323

626

2.6k

2.7k

2.9k

3.1k

Kingston KC2500 1TB NVMe 76

157

330

645

2.8k

3.1k

Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB NVMe 74

150

317

597

1.1k

2.4k

2.8k

3.1k

3.2k

3.3k

3.2k

WD Black SN750 1TB NVMe 12

430

750

1.1k

1.7k

2.1k

2.3k

2.6k

3.1k

3.3k

Crystal Disk Mark 6.0

CrystalDiskMark is a disk benchmark software Made by a Japanese coder named Hiyohiyo and is one of the simplest and most frequently used tests for storage due to its simple and easy to understand UI. It measure sequential reads/writes speed,measure random 512KB, 4KB, 4KB (Queue Depth=32) reads/writes speed,select test data (Random, 0Fill, 1Fill).

CrystalDiskMark 6

4KB Q1T1 Read

4KB Q1T1 Write

4KB Q32T1 Read

4KB Q32T1 Write

4KB Q8T8 Read

4KB Q8T8 Write

Sequential Reads

Sequential Writes

1000

2000

3000

4000

5000

6000

1000

2000

3000

4000

5000

6000

T-Force Cardea Gen4 51

235

619

412

1.6k

969

4.3k

Silicon Power Gen4 1TB 64

202

639

598

2.2k

4.2k

HP EX950 1TB NVMe 65

166

592

479

1.3k

1.5k

3.5k

3.1k

Kingston KC2500 1TB NVMe 60

154

557

412

1.4k

3.5k

2.9k

Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB NVMe 50

168

554

467

1.5k

2.2k

3.6k

3.3k

WD Black SN750 1TB NVMe 50

173

551

433

1.7k

2.1k

3.4k

AS SSD

AS SSD is the opposite of ATTO as it uses incompressible data rather than compressible data and simulates the worst possible scenario imaginable for an SSD which gives the best understanding of performance when pushing the drive to its limits.

We separate the IOPS and MB/s in the results for ease of reading.

AS SSD MB/s

4K Read

4k Write

4K 64T Read

4K 64T Write

Sequential Reads

Sequential Writes

900

1800

2700

3600

4500

5400

900

1800

2700

3600

4500

5400

T-Force Cardea Gen4 74

197

2.2k

3.4k

4.2k

3.7k

Silicon Power Gen4 1TB 77

184

227

3.5k

4.2k

3.8k

HP EX950 1TB NVMe 65

184

1.3k

2.6k

Kingston KC2500 1TB NVMe 61

178

1.4k

1.3k

2.5k

Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB NVMe 54

187

1.6k

2.4k

2.9k

WD Black SN750 1TB NVMe 49

197

1.7k

2.2k

3.1k

2.7k

AS SSD IOPS

16MB Read

16MB Write

4K Read

4K Write

512B Read

512B Write

4KB 64T Read

4KB 64T Write

146024

292048

438072

584096

730120

876144

146024

292048

438072

584096

730120

876144

T-Force Cardea Gen4 250

237

16.9k

50.4k

50.8k

52.1k

580.3k

798.6k

Silicon Power Gen4 1TB 256

235

19.9k

47.5k

47.4k

49.3k

577.8k

876.1k

HP EX950 1TB NVMe 186

162

16.9k

46.9k

50.1k

48.1k

322.9k

339.1k

Kingston KC2500 1TB NVMe 187

148

15.7k

45.7k

48k

46.6k

349.4k

328.3k

Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB NVMe 187

180

14.1k

47.7k

40.7k

50.6k

418.2k

630.6k

WD Black SN750 1TB NVMe 192

172

11.9k

50.2k

53k

49.7k

438.2k

569.2k

ANVIL's Storage Utilities

Anvil's Storage Utilities benchmark may be a bit of an older benchmark, but it's still very much relevant today. It takes various performance and response time metrics and gives them a score in read and writes then delivers an overall rating, which is useful to see where an HDD or SSD slots in general performance.

Anvil's Storage Utilities

Read Score

Write Score

Total Score

4000

8000

12000

16000

20000

24000

4000

8000

12000

16000

20000

24000

T-Force Cardea Gen4 7.6k

12.1k

19.6k

Silicon Power Gen4 1TB 7.7k

12.1k

19.8k

HP EX950 1TB NVMe 6.2k

10k

16.2k

Kingston KC2500 1TB NVMe 6.6k

9.4k

16k

Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB NVMe 6.6k

10.5k

17.1k

WD Black SN750 1TB NVMe 6.5k

11.6k

18.1k

Conclusion

The T-Force Cardea C440's $189.99 price tag for the 1TB ($364.99 for 2TB) does put it more in line with the premium-priced drives, and a little more expensive than the Silicon Power US70 we recently reviewed. But it isn't so far that it seems unreasonable. You're getting a mostly good looking (save for blue PCB) drive that has adequate cooling measure taken to ensure endurance performance. But with the upcoming Samsung 980 Pro, some people may have a pause. But that is a $229 drive and costing over 25% more. You're going to blow away Gen 3.0 drives with this one in almost all cases and if you find yourself needing to remove the heatsink for placing under one supplied by your board you can do that, but I'd likely save some change and go with another drive at that point.

The heatsink is quite effective with keeping the drive around 54C when there is active airflow around it and only topping out at 71C without direct airflow under our testing conditions.

The T-Force Cardea C440 is a solid performing drive that will be able to handle your workloads with ease and the 5-year warranty means you can rest assured it'll be taken care of if there are any issues for quite some time.

8.75

Wccftech Rating

Pros

Attractive and effective heatsink No thermal throttling in tests Great performance Solid warranty Well informed packaging

Cons

Blue PCB Tough Price Point Other Gen4 Drives offer similar performance for less

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