Performance
As I already mentioned, the performance has been tested on the Valve Steam Deck with installed Win11 Pro x64. Since the console supports only one SSD, all tests were performed on the TEAMGROUP MP44 1TB SSD with the installed operating system.
Let’s begin as usual with the ATTO Disk Benchmark.
Results in the ATTO benchmark are as high as expected, considering that the Steam Deck uses a PCIe 3.0×4 interface.
CrystalDiskMark shows us even better maximum read bandwidth – up to 3628MB/s and over 400k IOPS. On the other hand, this benchmark seems quite demanding during longer tests as it uses up the SLC, which is the main reason for worse performance in 16GiB tests. Thermal throttling is mainly visible in high queue read and write and sequential read (Q32T16 tests). These results are more important for server tasks and shouldn’t affect games much, mainly dependent on sequential read and random, low queue read (Q1T1).
TEAMGROUP’s internal benchmark uses CrystalDiskMark, too, so our results are not much different.
In PCMark 10, the results look better. Even though we can’t see very high bandwidth, they’re pretty good for a DRAM-less SSD running at PCIe 3.0.
3DMark Storage Benchmark shows about the same story as PCMark 10. Results are not very impressive but are not much lower than a typical result on a lower series PCIE 4.0 x4 SSD.
Anvil’s Storage Utilities is a rather old benchmark but is still popular. This benchmark usually shows lower results than the ATTO or the CrystalDiskMark. In fact, we can see lower-than-expected bandwidth on the MP44S SSD.
In the end, the AIDA64 Disk Benchmark results in random read and write operations.
Even though not all tests are as high as we wish, the MP44S is still one of the few M.2 2230 SSDs available in stores and one of the fastest of the available options. It’s probably the main reason why we won’t hesitate to recommend it to gamers who count on a compatible SSD for their mobile console.
