TeamGroup GA Pro 2TB Review: PCIe 5.0 SSD Draws Over 12.5W and Misses

Tom's Hardware measured over 12.5 watts peak power draw on the TeamGroup GA Pro 2TB — against a label rating of 8.25W — and concluded the $331.99 PCIe 5.0 SSD is a drive that "mostly misses." The reviewers found its performance low enough that they re-checked their own results and contacted TeamGroup before publishing.

The verdict, written by contributing writer Shane Downing, lands hard: the GA Pro has "enough problems that we would generally not recommend it except if it's on steep sale." The drive isn't the worst Tom's Hardware has tested. But the edges, as the review puts it, are rougher than usual.

What's inside the GA Pro?

The specifications read well on paper. The 2TB sample carries InnoGrit's IG5666 controller — the company's answer to the Phison E26, the chip that defined the first generation of high-end PCIe 5.0 drives — paired with 2GB of DDR4 DRAM and YMTC 232-layer TLC NAND. The drive is rated for 10,000 MB/s sequential reads and 8,500 MB/s sequential writes over a PCIe 5.0 x4 / NVMe 2.0 interface.

The line spans 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB capacities, though only the 2TB shows up at retail right now at $331.99, and the 8TB will probably be hard to find. Endurance is rated at up to 600TB of writes per terabyte of capacity — 1,200TB on the 2TB — with a five-year warranty across the range. There's no official IOPS rating, though drives in this class can achieve 1 million or more.

The hardware itself is mostly sound. The review notes the drive has "the right amount" of DDR4 for its flash, and the YMTC 232-layer TLC is "perfectly fine." The controller is the weak spot — and its firmware, as testing revealed, is what really keeps the GA Pro from reaching its potential even with its bandwidth cap.

Why does the controller run so hot?

Both the InnoGrit IG5666 and the Phison E26 run hot because they're built on an older process node, and newer flash wasn't available when they launched to more easily reach required bus speeds. The segment has since moved on to better controllers, including Phison's E28 and Silicon Motion's SM2508. Phison poured work into getting the E26 to full speed in steps, and even the base 10 GB/s versions run toasty. The GA Pro doesn't run full-out. That doesn't help much, the review says.

The GA Pro ships with a graphene heat-spreading label — a solution Tom's Hardware is fond of because graphene labels can be surprisingly effective. It's just not enough here. In most cases, users will want a heatsink, and they'll have better luck with the label removed, though it works in place. The drive is double-sided, with a controller, two DRAM packages, and four NAND flash packages.

The power situation is murkier still. The label's 3.3V / 2.5A rating implies a very optimistic 8.25W; testing told a different story at over 12.5W peak. Reported power states top off at 3.50W, which the reviewers can't rely on — meaning they can't even confirm the expected power-state enter/exit latencies, a detail that matters given TeamGroup's claims about the drive.

Where does the drive fall short?

The bright points are few. Performance highlights at QD8, and steady-state write speed is acceptable. Against that: very poor scores in some tests, poor low-QD reads, and the poor efficiency and high temperatures that follow from the 12.5W peaks. On paper, a PCIe 5.0 drive with DRAM should beat any PCIe 4.0 SSD; the GA Pro struggles to live up to its own class.

TeamGroup does maintain firmware for its drives — the test sample ran the newest revision, 050g05E7 — and offers its SSD S.M.R.T. TOOL for health monitoring plus the MultiDrive utility for backup and cloning on Windows, which Tom's Hardware continues to recommend. The company, which the review notes makes a storage product for every niche it can find, is still working to iron out the bugs. But with the underlying technology this old, the reviewers wouldn't hold their breath — and buyers holding out for a steep sale on the GA Pro are, on this evidence, better served by newer PCIe 5.0 silicon.