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Team Group T-Force Vulcan 500GB SATA SSD

Join the community - in the OCAU Forums! Date  29th August 2019 Author  James "Agg" Rolfe Manufacturer  Team Group Today I'm taking a look at the T-Force Vulcan 500GB SSD from Team Group. I've covered a few Team Group items recently, including their DDR4 SODIMM, memory, RGB SATA SSD and M.2 NVMe SSD. This time they're back with another 2.5" form-factor SSD available in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB size, and this sample is the 500GB model. You can read the specs sheet and other info on the product page on their website. This is in their "Vulcan" range of gaming-oriented products, which also includes the memory I reviewed a couple of weeks ago. It comes in a nice retail pack with specs on the back, including claimed read speeds of up to 560MB/s, and write speeds up to 510MB/s. This is in line with other drives we've seen recently, and of course is probably limited by the 6Gb/s SATA 3 interface. The specs sheet also lists SMART and TRIM support and makes note of the 3 year warranty from Team Group. Inside the box there's not much to look at, simply the drive itself in a protective tray and a small metallic T-Force sticker. The drive has a full metal chassis with nicely chamfered edges and knurled logos. It's not uncommon for the upper casing to be plastic on SSDs, so the metal cover on this one is a nice premium touch. Otherwise the drive is the same as most other 2.5" drives, being 7mm tall and having standard SATA data and power connectors. On to testing. Installation was straightforward and the drive formatted to 466GB GB under Windows 10. I'm going to compare it to the most recent and fastest SATA SSD I've tested previously, which happens to be Team Group's Delta R RGB unit in 250GB form. First up, some sequential speed testing with ASSSD and CrystalDiskMark. Performance in these tests is essentially identical between the two drives. Onward to PCMark 8's Storage test, which is described thusly on their website: Use the PCMark 8 Storage benchmark to test the performance of SSDs, HDDs and hybrid drives with traces recorded from Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office and a selection of popular games. You can test the system drive and local external drives. Unlike synthetic storage tests, the PCMark 8 Storage benchmark highlights real-world performance differences between storage devices. That summary score doesn't provide much info, but you can see the detailed run reports here: T-Force Delta R 250GB and T-Force Vulcan 500GB. Anyway, we again see essentially no difference between these two Team Force drives. In fact, if we cast our minds back to the T-Force RGB's review, we see that drive was barely any quicker than a competitor's drive from over two years ago. Are these drives slow? No, they're exactly as fast as we expect them to be. The limitation for any modern SATA SSD is not generally the architecture of the drive itself, but the 6Gb/s SATA 3.0 connection. Looking around, I can't see any drives doing much above 550MB/s read and 520MB/s write. So it's unsurprising that the T-Force Vulcan is also performing at that level. I can't help but have a faint twinge of sadness about this drive, because no matter how good it is, it's still stuck in something of a technological cul-de-sac. The age of the SATA SSD is drawing to a close. NVMe drives hugely outperform SATA drives and are increasingly price-competitive. This may well be the last SATA SSD I ever review. Food for thought. Having said all that, if you still have a PC with a spinning-platter SATA HDD and are looking for an easy upgrade, simply dropping in a SATA SSD to boot or load applications from will breathe new life into your PC in terms of responsiveness and load times. A quick look around shows this drive available at about the $105 mark in Australia, which is at a similar price point to other brands. Team Group offer a 3 year warranty which is good to see. This drive performs as well as any other we've tested, and doesn't confuse the issue by adding RGB or other non-essential features. So, if you're after an SSD for your desktop or laptop where NVMe isn't an option, I would recommend putting the Team Group T-Force Vulcan SATA SSD onto your short list. Thanks again to Team Group for the opportunity to review this drive. Feel free to discuss this review in this thread!

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