TeamGroup G70 Pro 2TB SSD Review: Low latency meets affordable DRAM

Another day, another TeamGroup drive, right? Yet the G70 Pro surprises with some unusually good results, combining DRAM and newer flash into a powerful but affordable drive. We have some questions about the controller choice, but the drive as a whole is surprisingly good.

The devil, as they say, is in the details, as its performance quirks make it better for some use cases over others. It’s also not something you want to toss into your laptop – this is still a high-end drive with correspondingly high heat production – but could work in a pinch for pretty much anything else. In this market, it’s a welcome alternative.

TeamGroup G70 Pro Specifications

If you’re ever upset that a drive only comes in one or two capacities, then the TeamGroup G70 Pro might be for you. Not only does it come in both heatsinked and non-heatsinked versions, but it’s also available at 512GB, 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and even 8TB. At the time of review, we could only find 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB models available, with pricing pretty close between the two types – go for the heatsink, if you can. We’re giving the lower prices at $197.99, $326.99, and $505.99. If you’re shooting for DRAM, these prices aren’t too bad, but we’d lean towards the Seagate FireCuda 530R instead at 1TB. The G70 Pro is more competitive at 2TB and 4TB against comparable drives.

The drive is capable of reaching up to 7,400 / 6,600 MB/s for sequential reads. Random read and write IOPS are not given, but we know this controller and flash are rated for at least 700K and can reach 1,000K or more. This is comparable to other drives in this class. We wouldn’t recommend the drive at 512GB as it can’t reach peak performance. Ideally, you would go for 2TB or 4TB for the best results. The drive is backed by a five-year warranty that covers 740TB of written data per TB, which is above average but not exceptional.

TeamGroup G70 Pro Software and Accessories

TeamGroup’s primary download for the G70 Pro is its SSD S.M.A.R.T. Tool. This all-in-one SSD toolbox displays drive and system information and allows for performance testing. While you can sometimes catch drive errors early with SMART, it’s best not to rely on it. For drive and data backup we continue to recommend MultiDrive for Windows and Clonezilla or Rescuezilla for everything else.

TeamGroup G70 Pro: A Closer Look

The 2TB TeamGroup G70 Pro is a double-sided drive and, judging by the specifications, always double-sided. We don’t have smaller SKUs to verify that, and we recommend the larger SKUs as the better value anyway. However, we’ve heard of single-sided G70 Pros at 1TB in the wild, so your mileage may vary.

Our drive uses a graphene label – which is useful for spreading heat from the controller, in particular – but there is also a version with a heatsink. We would recommend going with a heatsink, if possible. The rear of the drive states a power rating of ~8.25W, which is within expectations. In our testing, we would expect it to pull less and, in fact, that is what our numbers show.

The drive is adorned with an SSD controller, two DRAM packages, and four NAND flash packages. The controller is the InnoGrit IG5236, an eight-channel controller with DRAM that competes directly with the Silicon Motion SM2264 and Phison E18. These are at the top of the PCIe 4.0 product stack. The DRAM in question is SK hynix H5AN8G6NDJR-VKC, which, as the 8G indicates, is in an 8Gb or 1GB configuration. Two packages mean 2GB, which gives the normal 1GB:1TB DRAM:NAND ratio for optimal performance. The flash packages are 512GB each of YMTC 232-Layer TLC (X3-9070) with four 1Tb dies each. With a total of sixteen dies, or two per channel, performance is good at this capacity.

Let’s address the elephant in the room: the IG5236 controller. This controller was one of our favorites when it first came out, as it competed with the E18 – the first true non-proprietary high-end PCIe 4.0 controller – at a lower price point. Eventually, it saw some flash it didn’t like from YMTC, which caused some serious issues. Over time and with more feedback, the controller eventually gained a more general reputation for unreliability. Reliability reports were often unpredictable, which didn’t help matters. While, as a result, we do prefer the E18, our review of this G70 Pro sample has given indications that TeamGroup took some efforts to improve reliability. We’ll point these out as we go forward.

The bigger issue for the drive is probably that TeamGroup will likely not have one specific set of hardware for this drive, which means that, while we think you’re probably okay with the mix we got, we can’t guarantee this is the NAND and SSD controller configuration that you’ll receive.

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Comparison Products

If you’re looking at the G70 Pro, you’re probably also looking at TeamGroup’s A440 series – we have the A440 Pro for comparison – as well as the Inland Gaming Performance Plus or Performance Plus and the WD Black SN850X. These are all high-end Gen 4 drives with DRAM. If you’re willing to compromise on DRAM to save some money but still want high-end performance, there are some good options out there. These include the Addlink A93, the Acer Predator GM7, and the Biwin Black Opal NV7400. We’ve also thrown two newer drives into the mix, which are compelling: the Crucial P310, which uses QLC flash, and the WD Black SN7100, the power efficiency champion.

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 an evaluation for future-proofing is included where applicable.

The G70 Pro falls right in the middle of the pack, which is actually right where it should be. 43µs for latency in 3DMark is quite good, ensuring a good experience with fast game loading times. Any of these drives would be great for games – and probably overkill – but we look for 45µs or less for the best level of responsiveness. The G70 Pro hits this target.

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is an industry standard 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.

The G70 Pro does better in PCMark 10, coming in near the top with respectably high bandwidth and low latency. This is very good performance for applications, and the drive would be great as your primary drive even in a workstation. It makes use of the DRAM and eight flash channels to deliver relatively high performance, beating perennial favorites like the Black SN850X. This is likely due to the fact that it uses 232-Layer flash, which is newer than anything the slower drives have.

The Black SN7100 and P310 are DRAM-less with four channels, but they use newer flash of an equivalent generation with newer controllers than the G70 Pro. This goes to show that you don’t need a full-power controller to dominate here, but we caution that this does not reflect edge case performance with a fuller drive or in long-term use.

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. Based on our extensive 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.

The G70 Pro performs admirably in the PS5. Would we recommend it? Yes, but with caveats. It’s not a bad choice at 2TB and 4TB, but we would recommend getting the version with a heatsink, if possible. The drive might run toasty without it. We also think you can get DRAM-less drives that will perform nearly the same at a lower cost, that won’t need a heatsink, so factor that into any purchase decision.

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.

Taking a quick look at our DiskBench results, the G70 Pro exhibits no issues. Its copy performance is, in fact, quite good, coming close to the top. To be fair, some of the drives near it are DRAM-less, so they should be less expensive and more power-efficient in practice. That said, if you’re looking for the total package, then the G70 Pro will deliver. We would recommend checking our Write Saturation section to see how these drives measure up with longer transfers.

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.

Looking at ATTO first, we see a disappointing dip most prominently at 512KiB reads with the G70 Pro. The question is: controller or flash? Possibly a bit of both, as we’ve seen weak performance in ATTO on this controller before, but not all drives have had issues. If we’re comparing the XS70, which uses 512Gb dies with four-plane flash, to the G70 Pro, which has 1Gb dies using six planes, then we consider that the superpage size – this would be the size of all pages open across all dies/planes with at least one per flash channel – is quite different.

Parallelization is necessary to reach the best performance with larger files, and the G70 Pro’s flash crosses a threshold between 512KiB and 1MiB, which might explain this dip. In fact, the flash on the 2TB model would prefer I/O larger than 1MiB. The older XS70, as reviewed, would be happier with less. This is an inevitable trade-off as newer flash technology targets larger dies to reduce price and more planes for higher bandwidth to match new interface speeds.

This difference is reflected to some extent in CDM, where QD1 sequential read for the G70 Pro performance is pretty meh. Give it QD8, though, and it’s on top. Unfortunately, low QD is much more common, especially for large file transfers. Of course, you need another drive to match the speed anyway, and if you’re doing heavier workloads, you might actually push more than QD1 where this drive proves to be quite fast. The bottom line is that some of these drives with less-dense flash – like the Black SN850X – or fewer channels – that would be the P310, Black SN7100, A93, Black Opal NV7400, and GM7 – can do better with QD1 reads. On the other hand, the G70 Pro’s newer flash makes it more responsive with QD1 writes, although this is less impressive for everyday workloads.

The good news is that the 4KB latencies are good, and the 4KB random read latency at QD1 is exceptional. This is a ridiculously responsive drive. It’s a bit strange to have a drive that superficially should push bandwidth turn around and give such excellent latency. The discrepancy, given our above explanation about parallelization, is due in part to the fact that a single 4KB operation is only going to hit one die and plane of flash. This could work in the drive’s favor if you are taking advantage of the right workloads. For random reads, everyday workloads, including games and apps, will be very responsive. For larger transfers, push this drive harder if you’re reading from it to better take advantage of its strengths, or alternatively, use it for random writes as you could do with caching.

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, 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 including the steady state write performance.

The G70 Pro has a small cache, coming in around 50GB with a pSLC write speed of 6.7 GB/s that writes for about 7.5s effectively. We’ve seen caches of this size before, usually chosen to improve “quality of service,” which is a fancy way of saying the manufacturer wants to avoid a performance cliff. 50GB is still relatively large for caching random writes, and random writes are what you want to cache the most, and the absolute size will vary a lot less with drive fill, as it’s not taking up a lot of native flash. This means more consistent write performance. A drive might also use a small cache to hide weak flash – weak as in lower endurance – as the highest-endurance portion of the flash can be used for the cache, if you’re doing big writes like we are here, doing writes straight to the native flash can actually induce less wear in some cases. However, we think TeamGroup is just aiming for consistent performance, with the secondary effect being that they can swap flash if needed.

The drive then writes to native flash at almost 2.8 GB/s for 16 seconds. This flash can write faster than this and, given that the drive is 2TB, it could absolutely write in this state – or the pSLC state, for that matter – for a significantly longer time. The 4TB model should be as fast or faster. Still, this is pretty speedy and matches the consistent write experience we would anticipate from the small cache. On the other hand, it does make us wonder why TeamGroup is being so conservative with it. This controller has had some issues in the past, and this might be a way to mitigate those. If so, we’re on board, as this type of performance profile matches the drive’s overall trend quite well.

This is especially true with folding performance at over 1.35 GB/s – quite fast for that state – and given how small the cache is and how short the drive writes even in native mode, the real steady state is closer to our native flash speed at 2.75 GB/s. This is a very good result and supports our earlier assertion that this drive would be great for certain workloads like caching. TeamGroup likely knows this, and if the drive is more reliable for it, all the better. We think that’s worth knowing if you’re a buyer because the IG5236 controller does carry a somewhat negative reputation under normal circumstances.

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 in terms of capacity and performance. Desktops are often more performance-oriented with less support for power-saving features so we show the worst-case for idle.

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 but real-world temperatures will vary due to the environment and workload factors.

All this performance comes at a cost. The G70 Pro is not very efficient, although it’s better than the E18-based drive and comes awfully close to the Black SN850X. For a DRAM-equipped, eight-channel PCIe 4.0 drive, it does okay. If you are looking for a power-efficient drive, this isn’t it, although it could be worse.

The drive reports multiple temperatures, but the one we’re looking at is the highest. It hit a maximum of 71°C in our testing, which is surprisingly good, given that this controller starts to throttle at 90°C. That’s almost at our ideal 20°C of headroom. However, the drive is still putting out a lot of heat, and this is under good conditions with a graphene heatspreader. Running this drive naked in a laptop is inadvisable. We continue to recommend getting the G70 Pro with a heatsink or adding a heatsink to the graphene model – you can even put a heatsink over the graphene label, if necessary – to make for a cooler-running drive.

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 G70 Pro Bottom Line

The TeamGroup G70 Pro promises a little bit of everything in a challenging SSD market. DRAM? Check. All the best drives have DRAM, or so people have been led to believe, and that simple inclusion puts the G70 Pro up a notch. Newer flash? Also, check for our sample, 232-Layer rather than 176-Layer, and TLC too. In practice, the difference is small, but if you can get newer flash, you should, and TLC is always preferable to QLC. Cooling? It comes with a graphene heatspreader by default, but has a heatsink SKU for those who want one less thing to worry about. With this combo, the drive delivers excellent random read latency, good potential throughput, and with a heatsink, it shouldn’t overheat. Plus, it’s available in a wide range of capacities.

There are some caveats here, however. The drive is not power-efficient, so it is bound to run hot even if it doesn’t throttle. It has DRAM and newer flash, but the controller is the less desirable InnoGrit IG5236, one that’s known to be less reliable. The flash is also YMTC, which indicates to us that you might not always get the same hardware on this model. Performance is good, yes, but it’s not completely consistent across all of our tests. While we like that we can get this from 512GB to 8TB, in reality, you’re only going to find the middle SKUs. The drive is best at 2TB or 4TB, and its pricing at 1TB is average at best. We can live with this as 2TB and 4TB are good places to be, no matter what you use this drive for: primary for your operating system, secondary for games or storage, or in your PS5.

Speaking of what you use it for, the drive’s performance profile means it could make a good caching or NAS drive. We would definitely recommend a heatsink in that role. It’s not perfect for such a workload, but it’s probably going to be better than most of the DRAM-less options that are out there, and it should cost you less than the Black SN850X or 990 Pro. While reliability concerns linger with this controller, we feel like TeamGroup has optimized the firmware and pSLC cache towards a more consistent experience over hitting record numbers. This, in our mind, is a good thing and helps make this drive a potential diamond in the rough.

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