Teamgroup PD20 SSD review: Elegant, tough, and best for light use

Best Prices Today: Teamgroup PD20 SSD

The PD20 has lots to supply. It appears good, is light-weight, rugged, and performs effectively with smaller quantities of knowledge. However, sequential writing lagged in CrystalDiskMark 8 with the 64GiB knowledge set we take a look at all SSDs with.

It recovered to the promised write efficiency with the 32GiB knowledge set, which is effectively past what most customers write. But the problem damage the PD20’s standing within the efficiency charts, dropping it to final place amongst 20Gbps USB SSDs.

Teamgroup PD20 SSD: Features

The PD20 is a 20Gbps USB drive of diminutive proportions. It’s roughly 2.95 inches lengthy, 1.33 inches vast, and 0.59 inches thick, weighing round 0.8 ounces.

There’s a lanyard opening on one finish, and a Type-C port (with captive plug) on the opposite. The unit is darkish grey and pewter with the darkish grey portion a grippy silicone jacket. It feels good within the hand and the grippy jacket offers you the torque to insert the drive in difficult ports.

Teamgroup claims an IP54 ranking for the PD20. If you’re not acquainted, you may read about IP ratings here. But mainly, IP54 means functionally, if not completely, dustproof and protected from water spray. No immersion resistance is claimed, however having checked out lots of of IP-rated drives, you possibly can in all probability get away with a fast dip within the tub or sink.

Teamgroup was not inclined to offer us with the information on the kind of controller, quantity of DRAM (I doubt there’s any as 4K efficiency is simply so-so), or sort of NAND contained in the PD20.

I used to be not inclined to bash it with a hammer to seek out out. But my guess is, from the 300MBps write efficiency off secondary cache, the NAND is both current QLC or generation-old TLC.

The firm warranties the PD20 for 5 years, however once more, was disinclined to offer a TBW ranking. Given my guess on the NAND determine of 250-600TBW, you’re unlikely to write down that a lot knowledge in ten, not to mention 5 years. If you suppose you’ll exceed that, look to a USB4/TLC unit as an alternative.

Note that SSD longevity scores apply solely to writes, SSDs will proceed to permit reads far past any acknowledged write limits.

Teamgroup PD20: Price

At the time of this writing, the Teamgroup PD20 was obtainable for $95 for 1TB and $151 for 2TB. Not dangerous in any respect. 20Gbps USB SSDs, even gentle responsibility fashions such because the PD20, are typically a bit dearer.

There had been additionally 512GB and 4TB fashions listed on Amazon, however with no availability or pricing data.

Teamgroup PD20: Speed

The PD20 performs on par with a 20Gbps SSD — till you hit it with a considerable amount of knowledge . Then, it appears the controller, caching, and NAND merely can’t sustain.

The 2TB drive we examined ramped down its write tempo all through the 450GB copy. First to round 700MBps at concerning the 50GB mark, which is a touch as to why the PD20 had points with CrystalDiskMark 8 and its 64GiB knowledge set.

The PD20 later dropped to 500MBps, stalled at 0MBps for a few seconds, then dropped right down to 300MBps for almost all of the operation, with a few fast, however fleeting jumps again as much as 500MBps. You can see this phenomenon within the picture above.

Though the CrystalDiskMark 8 sequential write checks are anemic in comparison with the competitors, the reads are top-notch.

And, after we examined with the 32GiB knowledge set, the PD20 turned in numbers much like that of stated rivals. See beneath. GiB = GibiBytes, 2^30 reasonably than GB 10^9.

The CrystalDiskMark 8 4K efficiency (64GiB) for the PD20 was extra aggressive, however nonetheless behind general.

The PD20 was additionally barely off the tempo of the Corsair EX400U and Adata PD820 in our 48GB transfers, significantly throughout the 48GB folder write in FastCopy.

As already mentioned, the PD20 was slothful writing our actually massive 450GB file — taking nearly twice so long as the competitors, which had been additionally 2TB drives. To be truthful, these drives additionally decelerate drastically when writing off secondary cache; it simply occurs later within the course of.

Note: FastCopy is nominally efficient with exterior drives, however typically twice as quick as Explorer with inner NVMe SSDs.

The finish result’s that the PD20 is just not the SSD you need for writing very massive information. Say greater than 50GB. Anything past that, it’s thumb-twiddling time.

That stated, what number of customers write knowledge units this massive frequently? Not many. Even we don’t throughout our regular workday routine.

Teamgroup PD20: Conclusion

The engaging, ruggedized PD20 will do the job for many customers and at a sexy value level. But as I’ve acknowledged or intimated a few dozen instances already, it’s for gentle responsibility writing solely.

Of course, as all the time — store round. There’s loads of zippier competitors, albeit for a bit extra coin.

How we take a look at

Drive checks at the moment make the most of Windows 11 24H2, 64-bit working off of a PCIe 4.0 Samsung 990 Pro in an Asus Z890-Creator WiFi (PCIe 4.0/5.0) motherboard. The CPU is a Core Ultra i5 225 feeding/fed by two Crucial 64GB DDR5 5600MHz modules (128GB of reminiscence whole).

Both 20Gbps USB and Thunderbolt 5 are built-in into the motherboard and Intel CPU/GPU graphics are used. Internal PCIe 5.0 SSDs concerned in testing are mounted in an Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 adapter card siting in a PCIe 5.0 slot.

We run the CrystalDiskMark 8.04 (and 9), AS SSD 2, and ATTO 4 artificial benchmarks (to maintain article size down, we report solely the previous) to seek out the storage machine’s potential efficiency. Then we run a sequence of 48GB switch and 450GB write checks utilizing Windows Explorer drag and drop to point out what customers will see throughout routine copy operations, in addition to the far sooner FastCopy run as administrator to point out what’s attainable.

A 25GBps two-SSD RAID 0 array on the aforementioned Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 is used because the second drive in our switch checks. Formerly the 48GB checks had been accomplished with a RAM disk serving that objective.

Each take a look at is carried out on a NTFS-formatted and newly TRIM’d drive so the outcomes are optimum. Note that in regular use, as a drive fills up, efficiency could lower as a result of much less NAND for secondary caching, in addition to different components. This subject has abated considerably with the present crop of SSDs using extra mature controllers and much sooner, late-generation NAND.

Note that our testing MO evolves and these outcomes could not match these from earlier articles. Only comparisons contained in the article are 100% legitimate as these outcomes are gathered utilizing the present {hardware} and MO.