Another gaming handheld-oriented drive has arrived in our labs with the M.2 2230 format, but this time manufactured by Team Group. The drive is available with capacities of 1TB and 2TB, with a rated read speed of about 5000MB/s and write of about 3500MB/s, so mainstream territory.

The product is shipped inside a small, compact cardboard enclosure, highlighting the drive capacity on the top cover, along with features such SLC caching (specific to the integrated 3D QLC ICs), but also the included heatspreader with graphene:

On the back, we will note the drive technical specifications, the internal code name but also its serial number:

Additionally, the drive is protected inside thanks to a transparent plastic mold, which seems to be able to also accommodate a 2242 drive!

The MP44S is very compact, with a size of 30 x 22 mm, while the height is also only 3.7mm, being a single-sided SKU. The top heatspreader is a composite material containing graphene, which helps with a better heat dissipation along the surface of the drive; on its surface we will note a lot of information such as the company web page, the warranty period, the total capacity, the code name of the product, the serial number but also the power rating:

The back side of the PCB only includes a small sticker, with no extra components:

After removing the top foil, we will observe the controller but also the main NAND IC; for some reason, Team Group has included a secondary sticker here:

We did find here the PS5021-E21T controller, which supports the PCIe Gen 4 x4 interface, is compliant with NVMe 1.4 standard, has a single-CPU architecture with built-in ARM Cortex-R5, it was manufactured on TSMC’s 12nm process technology, supports up to 4-channels, a drive capacity of up to 4TB, NAND Flash with either QLC or TLC technologies and operates in a DRAM-less manner:

The NAND IC is a Micron 176-layer 3D QLC with a total capacity of 1TB: