Should you buy this SSD – Team Group CX2 2TB SSD

The CX2 from Team group is one of their newer more budget friendly SATA SSDs that would be a nice replacement for your standard mechanical hard drive.

Big shout out to Bykski South Africa for sending over our review sample for this video.

Models

Currently you get the CX1 and CX2 models, specs wise they look exactly the same except the CX2s are available in a bit larger sizes. I’m however not certain about the performance comparison as I don’t have a CX1 but looks like it could be the same.

Price

As for cost US pricing ranged from $36 to $180 but here in South Africa they range between R1000 to R3600 which does put them right on top a couple of over budget SATA ssds.

Specs

The CX2 SSDs feature SLC NAND Flash with a 3 year warranty and 1 Million hour MTBF (mean time between failures). The CX2 also features Wear-Leveling technology and ECC (Error Correction Code) for better reliability and longer life span.

So it sounds like a good new SSD for the market, but how does it perform, so we will get into the benchmarks just right after this.

Benchmarks

Benchmarks

Now as for the benchmarks im Going to compare to a couple of other Sata SSDs I have tested before and for fun a PCIe 3 and 4 Nvme SSD.  Also we currently only have the 2TB model here and speeds between the capacities do differ somewhat with the larger capacities being faster.

Sequential 

For sequential read and writes the CX2 was one of the slower SATA drives, with writes of 512MBPS and writes of 555 MBPS. But the margins are very close to each other, cause they are still all just SATA SSDs

Random

As for Random read and writes the CX2 was second slowest with writes of 233MBPS and reads of 218MBPS, which is about 55% slower than the fastest SATA SSD in this test. As we can see the CX2 doesn’t do all that great in the randoms. Being last or close to last in most of the tests.

Next for access time we also got different results here.

100GB Copy

• For a large File Copy test, I made a Steam backup of just over a 100GBs and made a duplicate on the same drive.
• The CX2 was the second fastest by far completing in 8min 48 sec. The fastest the WD blue 1tb at almost 8 minutes exactly.

38GB FILE

We did the same tests but with a smaller 38GB file as well, the results for the duplicate test was 2minutes and 46 seconds, copy from test was 1 minute and 29 seconds and lastly the copy to test 1 minute and 18 seconds. Being slightly faster than the mushkin source. 

Conclusion

So in the end we can see that the teamgroup CX2 is a rather average SSD. Performance is decent but nothing groundbreaking, the 3 year warranty is decent but there is SSDs out there with longer warranties, the 1million hour life cycle is also fairly decent, but again there is SSDs out there with much longer life cycles like some of the samsungs are rated for 2.5million hours. 

At least the cache did a pretty decent job, not losing any speed with our big 100GB file test. It was actually very consistent and one of the better performing drives for the test. The CX2 is a decent SSD, depending on the size you go for, this could be a good option for upgrading a laptop from a HDD or maybe storage for your games with the 2TB like we have here. But thats it thanks guys…