TEAMGROUP MP44L 500GB NVMe PCIe Gen 4x4 M.2 SSD Review: A Budget-Friendly Powerhouse

Bang for buck king of 4TB m.2 SSD's in late 2023 when I got it. Went for around $165. The price has creeped up since then but its still a solid bargain here in early 2024. Uses the Realtek RTS5762 controller (low cost but decent performance) with Hynix TLC flash (decent price, performance, and durability for a consumer drive at .5 DWPD) and has 128MB of DRAM to act as a buffer. Some of the TLC flash is ran in a pseudo "SLC cache" mode to improve performance which is how this thing performs so well despite using lower cost components. That performance will drop pretty hard if you get the drive near full because of that. So don't try to fill up more than 75% of the way if you want high performance. At 4TB though that still leaves plenty of space so IMO its not a big deal. It will still certainly beat the heck out of a lot of the QLC trash drives that are usually what sell for this price in this capacity range even when near full though. The supported PCIe gen is "only" 3.0 but that is still --perfectly-- fine, really quite good IMO, for almost anything you would need out of a consumer SSD in 2023/2024 and probably 2025 or 2026 at least as well. The generation of PCIe only effects max data transfer rates (that is linear reads/writes) which hardly matters at all for most desktop use cases once you get to PCIe 3.0 speeds. ===Its low queue depth random read/write performance that matters for desktops.=== Yes even in gaming. And this SSD does pretty well there thanks to its caching scheme despite the cheaper controller. To get significantly better performance than this drive you would have to step up to buying a Optane SSD (getting harder to find in late 2023 and still fairly expensive if you want more than 2TB, probably will need u.2 adapter as well.......) or a MUUUCH higher cost enterprise class SSD like a Kioxia CD8P or CM7, or the Solidigm P5810, or a Memblaze PBlaze7 7940 drives. Which are also not m.2 and did I mention how terribly expensive they are?? Note that this MIIIIIGHT change if Microsoft's Direct Storage ever really takes off among software developers. Right now that easily seems years away at best though. I think only 1-2 games support it as of early 2024. At least 1 of which sucks fairly badly (Forspoken) and the other has some serious bugs that making playing irritating. And this drive will still benefit a whole lot from software that properly uses Direct Storage anyways so you don't have to worry about it for a long long time.

I made a budget build from mostly spare parts I had on hand, but didn't have a storage drive for Windows. This one works perfect, as it's cheap and Gen3 speeds are plenty fast enough.

Got this and immediately installed/partitioned into 4 smaller drives in Windows 10. Reading other reviews here before purchase I noted that it will be slightly smaller than the full 4TB, because of the cache. I was expecting this, and I expect the partition tables also ate up some drive real estate here. Final size in AOMEI partition assistant is 3.73 TB. Since the Western Digital 2TB drive I have installed on the other M.2 slot is only showing as 1.82 TB, I figured this is about right where it need to be. It seems to be performing nice and snappy, which is a pleasant surprise as my B550 mobo is downclocking it from PCIE gen 4 to PCIE gen 3 speeds. I'm not really noticing a difference between the drive in the Gen 4 slot and this one. So overall it's inexpensive, reasonably fast, and doesn't seem to have any major problems that I can see.

Flawless and fast... Was going to build a mini PC and use this in it, but ended up as additional storage in my tower PC... screaming fast and holds a lot of game installs.

My High School Son needed to add more hard drive space in his laptop from existing 250 GB. This 2 TB is more than enough for now (or next 1 year or so) considering we have Synology setup at home for backups and long term storage. He use this for modern games along with his friends. Needed quick turn around time and professional quality for his school work as well as games. We are very pleased with the purchase.

Great for budget pc builds, does the job.

I want to leave a detailed review. I'm not very Bios and computer savvy, and I did run into some problems, and would like to explain what these problems are. This is a great hard drive (I will explain why in a second). I bought the 2 tb gen 3 version because my Asus motherboard (PRIME Z490-A) only supports gen 3 and not gen4. Gen 4 would work on the motherboard; however, I would not benefit from the increased speeds of a gen4. I know this, because my main M.2 drive with windows 10 on it is a gen 4 and it is not as fast as this Team group gen 3. My pc for the last few months had been running sluggishly. Thumbnails in folders with lots of graphics were loading slowly, and that horrible green line forming from left to right in Windows explorer was annoying. Moreover, my main drive which was a 1tb was getting rather full so I decided to buy this team group drive. Upon receiving the drive, I placed it into an Nvme external drive enclosure and cloned my internal C drive using Macrium reflect, a free software used for disk clones. The operation went smoothly, however, when using crystal disk mark, I noticed that my drive read and write speeds were very low or about half, on both the main M.2 and this new team group as well. My PC is clocked at 5-5.2 GHz, so something was not right. I spent a whole day researching this problem on the internet, and nobody really offered a real solution to the problem. The first thing is to check drive temperatures and mine were perfect around 40-45c. So, bad read and write speeds was not a throttling heat problem. This team group hard drive runs pretty cool, even without a heatsink or thermal strip. It turns out there are a few things we need to do in the BIOS to ensure these drives work at max capacity. First of all, I know this will sound stupid, (AND IT HAPPENED TO ME). When looking into your bios, imagine your BIOS page to be really TALL. Almost certainly you cannot see all the options without scrolling all the way down the page. I know this is silly, but in the advanced section of my Bios I could only see about 14 options on the left side, and the option I needed onboard device configuration is way under that. You need to find this onboard function is any bios, not just the Asus bios and you need to set your M.1 and M.2 slots at full speed, other wise your Nvme drives are going to function at half the read and write rates. Once I made these changes both drives started reading at full speed. (crystaldisk mark is the software you need). My other drive is an older Corsair gen 4 drive with heatsink 9I paid a fortune for this 2 years ago), and it is not nearly as fast as this teamgroup, which went a little above 3500 mb/s. In a nutshell, so many people online complain that they are getting half the speeds with their Nvme drives, and do not know why. The answer is in your Bios! It’s not drivers, it’s not having your Sata devices enabled or disabled in the Bios, It’s not choosing between GEN1 GEN 2 GEN3 AND GEN 4 in the Bios. It’s simply the ONBOARD FUNCTIONS in the AVANCED area of the bios, which is down about 14-16 items in the list. You have to set your M.1 and M.2 SPEEDS ACCORDINGLY.