Introduction

Team Group is a well-known Taiwanese hardware manufacturer with a long history of catering to the needs of enthusiasts and gamers from all over the globe. Their lineup includes DRAM memory and solid-state drives, and they also offer various memory cards and USB thumb drives.

In this review we’re taking a look at the Team Group MP44S, a highly compact M.2 NVMe drive in the 2230 form factor, which means it’s only 30 mm long. With such small dimensions it will fit as a storage upgrade for the Valve Steam Deck. You may also use the MP44S to expand the storage of the ASUS ROG Ally game console and various Microsoft Surface Pro devices. Of course the drive will also fit into cases where an M.2 2242 PCIe drive has to be used.

While M.2 2230 drives have been on the market for a while, these are usually only available with limited sizes. The Team Group MP44S is available in a 1 TB and 2 TB capacity, which used to be quite rare for this form factor, but recently several such drives were released.

Internally, the Team Group MP44S uses a Phison E21 controller, that we’ve seen on many other drives before. The NAND flash is 176-layer QLC from Micron. A DRAM cache chip is not installed, due to the limited space available. To connect with the rest of the system, the PCI-Express 4.0 interface is used.

The Team Group MP44S is available in capacities of 1 TB ($78) and 2 TB ($180). Endurance for these models is set to 250 TBW and 450 TBW, respectively. Team Group includes a five-year warranty with the MP44S.