TeamGroup T-FORCE VULCAN Z 256GB 2.5 inch SATA SSD

A 256GB 2.5 inch SATA solid state drive. The straightforward upgrade for a machine still running a mechanical hard drive, or a boot drive for a budget build.

Key specifications

• Capacity: 256GB
• Interface: SATA III 6Gb/s
• Form factor: 2.5 inch, 7mm
• Sequential read: 520 MB/s
• Sequential write: 450 MB/s
• NAND: 3D NAND
• DRAM cache: none, DRAM-less design
• Endurance: 80 TBW
• MTBF: 1,000,000 hours
• Warranty: 3 years

What DRAM-less means

This drive has no DRAM cache. It uses a portion of the NAND as an SLC cache instead. For everyday use, boot, browsing, office work and games, you will not notice. Under sustained heavy writes, once the SLC cache fills, write speed drops noticeably.

That is the correct trade at this price. If you write large files continuously, an NVMe drive with DRAM is the right choice.

SATA in 2026

SATA is slower than NVMe by a wide margin on paper, 520 MB/s against several thousand. In practice, for boot times and application loading, the difference is far smaller than the numbers suggest. Buy SATA when the machine has no free M.2 slot, which is the honest reason most people still do.

256GB is small. Windows plus a couple of modern games will fill it. Consider 512GB or 1TB unless this is purely a boot drive.