ADATA Legend 970 2TB SSD Review

ADATA Technology is the world's second-largest manufacturer of DRAM memory and they have a huge portfolio of memory products both consumer and industrial including a large range of SSDs. The latest addition to their Legend series of high-end NVMe drives is the Legend 970, the company's first to use the PCIe Gen 5 interface.

The Legend 970 product line is currently made up of just two capacities, 1TB and 2TB (the drive ADATA kindly supplied for this review). ADATA rates the 2TB drive as up to 10,000MB/s for both Sequential read and writes, the 1TB drive is rated at up to 9,500MB/s and 8,500MB/s for Sequential read and writes respectively. 4K random performance for the 2TB model is quoted as up to 1,400,000 IOPS for both reads and writes. The 1TB drive has the same 1,400,000 IOPS write rating as the 2TB drive but with slower reads at 1,300,000 IOPS.

The Legend 970 uses a combination of Phsion's S5026-E26 controller and 232-Layer Micron B58R TLC NAND. Phsion's S5026-E26 supports eight NAND channels at transfer speeds up to 2,400 MT/s but for the Legend 970, ADATA has it clocked around the 1,600MT/s mark to get the 10,000MB/s headline figure. The controller supports LDPC (Low Density Parity Check Code) error correction and provides the AES 256-bit encryption that ADATA has enabled on the drive.

Using the ATTO benchmark we couldn't get to the maximum Sequential read figure of 10,000MB/s with a test result of 8,890MB/s. Sequential writes were a lot closer to the official 10,000MB/s maximum at 9,500MB/s.
However, using the default CrystalDiskMark 8 benchmark we could confirm the official Sequential figures with test results of 10,079MB/s for reads and 10,185MB/s for writes.

When it comes to 4K random performance the 2TB drive is rated as up to 1,400,000 IOPS for both read and writes. Using our 4-threaded tests we couldn't get close to this figure with best test results of 520,556 IOPS and 457,341 IOPS for reads and writes respectively. We could however confirm those official maximums using Peak Performance profile settings in CrystalDiskMark 8 with a read result of 1,495,543 IOPS while the write result soared past the official figure at 1,640,966 IOPS.

The Legend 970 comes with an active air cooling solution to keep the drive cool. It uses a well-made aluminium heatsink that uses dual-layer fins that have a special surface crystallization coating to increase the air contact area. Built into the heatsink is a micro fan (which uses a SATA power connector). The combination works pretty well as the hottest we saw the drive get was 60° C when being pushed hard when using CrystalDiskMark 8 to run a Sequential QD1-32 write test.

We found the 2TB ADATA Legend 970 for £289.99 on AWD-IT HERE.

Pros

• Fast Sequential Performance.
• PCIe 5.0 interface.
• Well-designed heatsink.
• AES 256-bit hardware-based encryption.

Cons

• Needs a PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot to get the best out of it.
• No 4TB in the current (at the time of writing) line-up.
• Fans can be a little noisy at times.

KitGuru says: The Legend 970 is ADATA's first foray into the Gen 5 market. It offers fast Sequential performance, a well-designed heatsink to help keep it cool and also comes with 256-bit hardware-based encryption.

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