TeamGroup has given us a glimpse of its next innovation in liquid-cooled SSDs, as well as teasing new DDR5 RAM aimed at gamers.
Those of you with an interest in exotic storage devices may recall that TeamGroup’s original Cardea Liquid SSD gave the firm the claim to fame of launching the world’s first water-cooled M.2 SSD.
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Now the Cardea Liquid II is about to be revealed at ‘TeamEvent 2021’ on September 23, and the difference is this sequel is a closed-loop cooling solution, rather than the original Cardea Liquid which was designed around a module housing the liquid (waterblock) that sat atop the drive.
We can see the all-in-one cooling solution in silhouette in a teaser image which shows a 120mm radiator and tubing attached to the actual SSD (plus pump) in an enclosure. As Wccftech, which spotted this, points out, it looks like the enclosure may even be able to accommodate more than one solid-state drive, and it could fit into a PCIe slot (in other words, it’ll be installed in the PC as a board, like a discrete graphics card for example).
We’ll only get the full picture of exactly how TeamGroup plans to implement this liquid-cooled SSD when the press event rolls around later this month. TeamEvent 2021 will also see the revelation of the company’s “latest technology overclocked DDR5 memory”, with Vulcan DDR5 sticks set to be shown off.
Analysis: How compelling is liquid-cooling for storage anyway?
Liquid-cooling has moved from being the province of beefy PC components like the CPU and GPU, and is now used for hardware like storage as we see here, and system RAM.
But do you really need a liquid-cooled SSD? Well, probably not, but then this is another component aimed at those willing to go to extremes, and to empty their wallet in a big way, to get the best – not to mention the fanciest looking components.
Of course, we don’t know anything about the performance of the Cardea Liquid II yet, but given the setup, we’d obviously expect a seriously fast drive (otherwise, what would be the point)? The question is how the hype and fanciness, plus the undoubted cost – an all-in-one cooling setup like this won’t be cheap to make – will balance up against that performance level. We’ll only know that when we find out the full details of the SSD at TeamGroup’s event later this month.
TeamGroup’s original Cardea Liquid SSD offered read speeds of up to 3400 MB/s and writes of up to 3000 MB/s with the 1TB model (and it also came in 256GB and 512GB flavors).
