The TeamGroup L5 LITE 3D (480GB) SATA SSD Review: Entry-Level Price With Mainstream Performance
by Billy Tallis on September 20, 2019 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- SSDs
- SATA
- Silicon Motion
- SM2258
- TeamGroup
Conclusion
The SATA SSD market is pretty boring these days, and just about the only way for a product to stand out is to be significantly cheaper than the competition. Sometimes we see one of the top brands use the advantages of their vertical integration to price a great product low enough to shut out lots of lesser entry-level drives. It's relatively rare that we see the same tactic pulled off by a smaller fabless OEM. For most of its time on the market, the TeamGroup L5 LITE 3D has been one of the cheapest drives in the North American market. The low pricing alone was reason enough for me to ask Team to send one my way last time they were offering up SSDs for review. The L5 LITE 3D didn't disappoint.
The performance profile of the Team L5 LITE 3D generally fits what we expect from a mainstream SATA SSD rather than an entry-level drive. None of our tests revealed any significant performance loss from the SLC cache filling up, and running our ATSB Heavy and Light tests on a full drive didn't bring it to its knees. The only negative result that really stands out is with random reads, which are both slower and more power-hungry than what we see with competing SATA drives from top-tier brands like Crucial, WD and Samsung. Even then, the difference is most pronounced at higher queue depths that are less likely to be encountered during typical real-world usage.
The Team L5 LITE 3D's power consumption under load is generally a bit high, but not enough to worry about. What is a real problem is that idle power management doesn't work as it should—it idles around 0.5W with or without SATA link power management. It's impossible for us to test whether the deeper DevSleep mode works properly since our testbed is a desktop system, but the intermediate Slumber state should be able to get the drive well under 0.1W.
The Team L5 LITE 3D is a decent choice for a desktop that is overdue for an upgrade to its first SSD, and it's a very affordable way to add a second SSD to a system where the primary SSD is getting full. The power management issues make it a poor choice to go into a laptop, and for an all-new desktop build the primary SSD should probably be a NVMe drive rather than SATA except where the budget is extremely tight. For users with fairly light storage workloads, the low write endurance of the L5 LITE 3D should still be plenty, and it's probably a more sensible tradeoff than the sometimes steep performance penalty of DRAMless SATA SSDs.
While SSD prices were still in freefall, the L5 LITE 3D was leading the charge and occasionally standing out to a degree we haven't seen since the Mushkin Reactor first made 1TB SSDs relatively affordable back in the planar NAND days. Now that SSD prices have leveled out, the Team L5 LITE 3D doesn't stand out as much, but it's still a good deal for a cheap SSD that doesn't really feel cheap.
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flyingpants265 - Friday, September 20, 2019 - link
Why promote this drive without mentioning anything about the failure rates? Some Team Group SSDs have 27% 1-star reviews on newegg. That's MUCH higher than other manufacturers.. That's not worth saving $5 at all... Is Anandtech really that tone-deaf now?-I would not recommend this drive to others -- 5 months, dead.
-Not safe for keep your data.Highly recommend not to store any important data on it
-DO NOT BUY THIS SSD! Total lack of support for defective products! Took days to reply after TWO requests for support, and then I am expected to pay to ship their defective product back when it never worked!?
-Failed and lost all data after just 6 months.
...
Ryan Smith - Friday, September 20, 2019 - link
"Is Anandtech really that tone-deaf now?"Definitely not. However there's not much we can say on the subject with any degree of authority. Obviously our test drive hasn't failed, and the drive has survived The Destroyer (which tends to kill obviously faulty drives very early). But that's the limit to what we have data for.
Otherwise, customer reviews are a bit tricky. They're a biased sample, as very happy and very unhappy people tend to self-report the most. Which doesn't mean what you state is untrue, but it's not something we can corroborate.
* We've killed a number of SSDs over the years. I don't immediately recall any of them being Team Group
eastcoast_pete - Friday, September 20, 2019 - link
Ryan, I appreciate your response. Question: which SSDs have given up the ghost when challenged by the "destroyer"? Any chance you can name names? Might be interesting for some of us, even in historic context. Thanks!keyserr - Friday, September 20, 2019 - link
Yes anecdotes are interesting. In an ideal world we would have 1000 drives of each model put through its paces. We don't.It's a lesser known brand. It wouldn't make too much sense if they made bad drives in the long term.
Billy Tallis - Friday, September 20, 2019 - link
I don't usually keep track of which test a drive was running when it failed. The Destroyer is by far the longest test in our suite so it catches the blame for a lot of the failures, but sometimes a drive checks out when it's secure erased or even when it's hot-swapped.Which brands have experienced a SSD failure during testing is more determined by how many of their drives I test than by their failure rate. All the major brands have contributed to my SSD graveyard at some point: Crucial, Samsung, Intel, Toshiba, SanDisk.
eastcoast_pete - Friday, September 20, 2019 - link
Billy, I appreciate the reply, but would really like to encourage you and your fellow reviewers to "name names". An SSD going kaplonk when stressed is exactly the kind of information that I really want to know. I know that such an occurrence might not be typical for that model, but if the review unit provided by a manufacturer gives out during testing, it doesn't bode well for regular buyers like me.Death666Angel - Friday, September 20, 2019 - link
You can read every article, I remember a lot of them discussing the death of a sample (Samsung comes to mind). But it really isn't indicative of anything: sample size is crap, early production samples (hardware), early production samples (software). Most SSDs come with 3 years of warranty. Just buy from a reputable retailer, have a brand that actually honors warranty and make sure to back up your data. Then you're fine. If you don't follow those those rules, even using the very limited data Billy could give you won't help you out in any way.eastcoast_pete - Friday, September 20, 2019 - link
To add: I don't just mean the manufacturers' names, but especially the exact model name, revision and capacity tested. Clearly, a major manufacturer like Samsung or Crucial has a higher likelihood of the occasional bad apple, just due to the sheer number of drives they make. But, even the best big player produces the occasional stinker, and I'd like to know which one it is, so I can avoid it.Kristian Vättö - Saturday, September 21, 2019 - link
One test sample isn't sufficient to conclude that a certain model is doomed.bananaforscale - Saturday, September 21, 2019 - link
This. One data point isn't a trend. Hell, several data points aren't a trend if they aren't representative of the whole *and you don't know if they are*.