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The latest Gen 5 SSD from ADATA sits under the company's XPG gaming brand. The XPG Mars 980 Blade is ADATA's second generation of Gen 5 drives, offering speeds of up to 14,000MB/s for reads and 13,000MB/s for writes. We review the 2TB model priced at just under £200 here in the UK.
ADATA's latest family of Gen 5 drives, the XPG Mars 980, is available in two versions: the PRO with active cooling and the passively cooled Blade and in three capacities: 1TB, 2TB and a flagship 4TB drive. The drive ADATA supplied for review is a 2TB Blade model.
For the XPG Mars 980 Blade, ADATA are using a Silicon Motion SM2508 controller teamed up with 232-layer NAND, and the drive uses a 2GB LPDDR4 DRAM IC.
The 2TB drive is rated as up to 14,000MB/s for Sequential reads, and incidentally, all three drives in the range get this rating. The 2TB and 4TB drives get a Sequential write rating of 13,000MB/s, while the 1TB drive gets 10,000MB/s.
The 2TB drive gets the fastest 4K read rating of the range of up to 2,000,000 IOPS. The 1TB entry model gets up to 1,600,000 IOPS, and the 4TB, 1,950,000 IOPS. 4K writes are rated as up to 1,650,000 IOPS for all three drives.
The 2TB XPG Mars 980 Blade endurance is rated as up to 1,480TBW, and ADATA backs the drive with a five-year limited warranty.
Physical Specifications:
- Usable Capacities: 2TB.
- NAND Components: 232-layer 3D TLC NAND.
- NAND Controller: Silicon Motion SM2508.
- Cache: 2GB LPDDR4-2666MHz.
- Interface: PCIe Gen 5 x4, NVMe 2.0.
- Form Factor: M.2, 2280.
- Dimensions: 80 x 22 x 4.5mm (with heatsink), 80 x 22 x 3.2mm (without).
- Drive Weight: 12g (with heatsink), 8g without.
Firmware Version: Y0508B.
