Team Group Vulcan T253TV500G3C301 500 GB

Volcanic rock

Vulkan SSD is a top-end 2.5-inch solid state drive of the "gaming" brand T-Force, owned by the Taiwanese company Team Group. Two features make it top of its class at once: read speed at the limit of the SATA 3 interface (560 MB / s) along with high write speed even outside the virtual SLC array (details below), and a cool metal case with stylish engraving. While most other SATA 2.5 "SSDs have switched to plastic in order to reduce costs.

progressive controller

“Under the hood” of the T-Force Vulkan SSD is a smart Silicon Motion SM2258 controller, and not a banned XT version, but a fully functional EN with support for a separate operational buffer chip. This allows the SSD to achieve random reads and writes of the smallest 4K blocks up to 90k IOPS.

Flexible caching algorithm

Flash memory in the T-Force Vulkan SSD is used by Micron's 3D TLC, and it's clearly selected. The principle of virtual caching is as follows: when sequentially writing a data volume that does not exceed a third of the free disk space (that is, up to 166 GB in the case of an empty disk), the speed is 500 MB / s. And after exceeding the SLC cache, the speed drops only by half — up to 250 MB / s. For comparison, for an SSD based on a combination of the Phison S11 controller and Toshiba flash memory, the speed drops to 100 MB / s, and the volume of the array is fixed — strictly 8 GB.

Universal Soldier

All in all, the T-Force Vulkan SSD is one of the best 2.5-inch SATA SSDs out there, and it's also very versatile. It is suitable for desktop PC, game console, and laptop. The only exceptions are the thinnest ultrabooks, which fit only a miniature M.2 SSD. Fortunately, there are also such in the assortment of Team Group: the mid-range MP33 on the Phison E13 controller with speeds up to 1700 MB / s and the flagship MP34 on Phison E12 up to 3000 MB / s.