Intro

The Team Group PD400 Portable USB 3.1 Gen 1 240GB SSD Review – External USB 3.1 vs. Internal SATA SSDs vs. SSHD vs. PCIe NVMe

We have five SSDs (Solid State Drives) in BTR’s PC with more than 3TB of mostly games, and yet we always need more storage. Using hard disk drives (HDD) or even Solid State Hard Drives (SSHD) are out of the question because of how slowly they load games and levels compared with SSDs. We are going to focus on the entry-level Team Group portable USB 3.1 Gen 1 PD400 240GB SSD to see if it is suitable for storing, loading, and launching games.

BTR uses two identical 480GB Team Group L5 LTE SSDs as boot drives – one for AMD and one for NVIDIA – together with a 1.92 TB SanDisk SSD and a 2 TB Micron 1100 SSD for our primary game storage. In addition, we also use a T-FORCE Vulcan SATA 500GB SSD for additional storage whereas previously we used a 2 TB Seagate FireCuda Solid State Hard Drive (SSHD) for additional storage.

For this review, we are going to compare the performance of the above four drives to the portable Team Group 240GB PD400 SSD. According to Team Group, the 240GB version isn’t being sold in the USA, so we will use $59.99 for the 480GB PD400 which on sale at Amazon; the suggested price is $77.03. The T-FORCE Vulcan 500GB SSD can be found for $63.99; the Kingston A1000 480GB NVMe SSD is $85.02, the 480GB Team Group L5 SSD is $50.99, and a 2 TB FireCuda SSHD sells for $78.76 which is a 7200 rpm Seagate HDD coupled with 8 GB of flash drive. BTR’s August review of the Vulcan 500GB SSD was set up on the same drive that has been unused since then, so we will reuse those results for this evaluation.

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BTR’s test setup uses Windows 10 64-bit, featuring an Intel Core i7-8700K overclocked to 4.8GHz for all cores as set in the EVGA Z370 FTW motherboard’s BIOS, and 16 GB of T-FORCE XTREEM DDR4 at 3866MHz. The settings and hardware are identical except for the four drives being tested, and the graphics are powered by a RTX 2060 SUPER Founders Edition (FE). We benchmark with all of our drives at less than 80% capacity, and in addition, all of the drives have been in use for months except for the portable Team Group PD400 SSD which has been “dirtied” using IOmeter, so our testing tends to give more real world performance results.

Here are the features and specifications of the Team Group PD400 portable SSD taken directly from Team Group’s website.

FEATURES

Meticulous texture with a warm touch. Unique Navy blue appearance.

The PD400 is compatible with Windows PCs, MAC OS, Android devices laptops and desktops.

Water Repellent, dust proof (IP66) [1] , shock proof, and pressure resistant.

, shock proof, and pressure resistant. USB 3.1 Gen1 high-speed transfer.

SSD is good value compared to hard disk drive.

Support UASP.

3-year product warranty with free technical support service. Specifications

All of the details can be found on the Team Group website. The IP66 rating is not explained there, but it means that the PD400 is “Protected from total dust ingress” as well as “Protected from high pressure water jets from any direction”. So as long as its included dust plug is inserted properly, you can probably shower with it but not take it with you while swimming.

Important key highlights are that the PD400 external SSD is fast, durable, lightweight, shock resistant, uses very little power, and it is backed by Team Group’s 3-year warranty. Since USB 3.1 Generation 1 can reach speeds of up to 5Gbps, data transfers are usually faster than SSD speeds.

The specifications look good for an inexpensive entry-level external SSD. Let’s take a closer look by unboxing the Team Group PD400 next.