The Team Group MP34 512GB SSD Review: Refining Phison's NVMe Workhorse

Conclusion

The hardware in the Team Group's MP34 SSD is nothing new; plenty of other brands have been selling basically the same drive for months. What's interesting about the MP34 is the newer firmware it uses for the Phison E12 controller. Some other brands have been slower to start shipping Phison's firmware updates, and many fail to offer the updates for drives that have already been sold. This is a shame, because the Team MP34 shows that Phison has continued to refine their firmware, bringing modest performance improvements with no significant sacrifices. Phison tends to offer more post-launch firmware updates than most other controller vendors. For their first generation NVMe controller, this was a necessity to remedy obvious shortcomings, but for the Phison E12 controller this continuing support is just icing on the cake.

There are only a handful of cases where the we see other drives achieving better performance out of the same Toshiba/SanDisk 3D TLC, though we expect we'd see a few more if we had the chance to test the 500GB WD Black SN750. Overall, Phison is doing a good job of handling the NAND they're working with, and the cases where their drives fall behind seem to be more often due to shortcomings with the NAND itself than with Phison's controller or firmware. Phison provides firmware to use their recent controllers with Micron NAND instead of Toshiba/SanDisk, but for this generation almost nobody is using that option. This is likely to change with their next generation of controllers, and there will probably be much more diversity among Phison E16 drives than among Phison E12 drives.

The Phison E12 is now well-established as a solid platform that can handle heavy workloads with no trouble. It doesn't set benchmark records, but it provides great performance even under adverse conditions. And for mobile users, it has employs solid power management techniques and doesn't burn a lot of power trying to be the absolute fastest.

For now, Phison E12 drives are largely interchangeable, with a few exceptions like the Gigabyte Aorus RGB. The Team MP34 only stands out by having a shorter three-year warranty period compared to the standard five years for this product segment. Given that shorter warranty, it needs to be a bit cheaper than the competition. At the moment, it's not really accomplishing that: the 256GB model is $2 less than the Silicon Power P34A80 that is basically the same drive with a 5-year warranty, and at higher capacities the Silicon Power drive is substantially cheaper. Which may sound like splitting hairs, but that's the challenge inherent in a commodity market like SSDs.

Phison E12 drives in general are the cheapest current-generation high-end NVMe drives on the market, which is appropriate given that they are a bit slower overall than the Silicon Motion based competitors or the top drives from Samsung and WD. Since the Phison E12 drives are still plenty fast for almost every use case and their performance is more well-rounded than the Silicon Motion SM2262EN drives, Phison drives are currently the best deals in this market segment, but the Team MP34 isn't quite the top pick from that crowd.

Flash memory prices are still in decline, but they aren't in free-fall like last year and are starting to stabilize. The transition from 64-layer 3D TLC to 9x-layer 3D TLC has slowed to a crawl, and we aren't expecting any new controllers to shake up the market in the near future. For the next few months, we expect this market segment to be relatively unchanged. A few more Phison E12 and SM2262EN drives are on the way and prices will go down a bit further, but overall things are going to be much calmer than last year.