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The Legend 970 is ADATA's first crack at the slowly growing PCIe Gen 5.0 market segment. The drive uses a combination of a Phison controller and 232-layer NAND and comes with an active cooling solution. We review the 2TB model, landing at just under £300 here in the UK.
ADATA's Legend 970 product comprises (at the time of writing) just two models, a 1TB drive and the flagship 2TB unit (the drive ADATA kindly supplied for review). At the heart of the drive is a Phison PS5026 E26 8-channel controller looking after 232-layer Micron 3D TLC NAND and 4GB of LPDDR4-4266 DRAM cache.
Sequential performance for the 2TB drive is quoted as up to 10,000MB/s for both read and writes while 4K random performance is listed as up to 1,400,000 IOPS for both. The 1TB drive gets ratings of up to 9.500MB/s and 8,500MB/s for Sequential read/writes respectively while 4K random read performance is quoted at 1,300,000 IOPS with random writes at 1,400,000 IOPS as per the 2TB drive.
Endurance is listed as 700 TBW and 1400 TBW for the 1TB and 2TB models respectively and ADATA backs the drive with a 5-year warranty.
Physical Specifications:
Usable Capacities: 2TB.
NAND Components: 232-layer Micron B58R 3D TLC NAND.
NAND Controller: Phison PS5026 E26, 8-channel.
Cache: 4GB of LPDDR4-4266.
Interface: PCIe Gen 5 x4, NVMe 2.0,
Form Factor: M.2, 2280.
Dimensions: 80.6 x 24.2 x 17.9mm.
Drive Weight: 57.1g.
Firmware Version: EQFM22.0.
The Legend 970 comes in a pretty compact box with a decent image of the drive on the front along with details of the format and interface it uses. The rear of the box has a small multilingual list of the drives features.
The ADATA Legend 970 is built on a dual-sided format. On one side of the PCB is the Phison PS5026-E26 8-channel controller, two 512GB packages of Micron 232-layer 3D TLC NAND and a 4GB DDR4-4266 DRAM cache IC. The other side of the board holds another pair of 512GB NAND packages.
The drive uses an active cooling system comprising an aluminium alloy heatsink and a microfan. The heatsink uses dual layer fins which have been treated with surface crystallization to increase the overall air contact area. The tiny fan gets its power via a SATA power connector. The cooler adds around 17mm to the height and 4mm to the width of the drive.
ADATA's SSD management utility goes by the name SSD ToolBox. Looking beyond the graphically rich GUI, the SSD ToolBox is a feature-rich and useful tool. There's a pretty comprehensive drive information page that includes remaining space, drive temperature and drive health. You get two diagnostic options, Quick and Full. The Quick option runs basic tests on free space of the selected drive while the Full option runs a reading test on all used space of the selected drive.
The utilities page includes Security Erase, Firmware updates and an export log and there is a performance benchmark. The SSD ToolBox also offers drive cloning support as well.
For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real-world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system.
This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits.
Main system:
AMD Ryzen 7 7700X, 32GB DDR5-6000, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 and a Gigabyte AORUS X670E Xtreme motherboard.
Other drives:
Corsair MP700 PRO 2TB
Crucial T700 2TB
Crucial T700 with Heatsink 2TB
Gigabyte AORUS 10000 2TB
Seagate FireCuda 520 2TB
Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark 4.
CrystalMark 8.0.0.
AS SSD 2.0.
IOMeter.
UL Solutions PC Mark 10.
UL Solutions 3DMark Storage Benchmark.
Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Official Benchmark.
All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.
CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure the theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSDs. We are using v8.0.
In CrystalDiskMark 8's 4K QD1 T1 test, the ADATA Legend 970 2TB sits at the bottom of the table with a read result of 84.39MB/s backed up with a write score of 323.22MB/s. Although the drive sits at the bottom of the Gen 5 drives we've tested to date, in reality, we are only talking 2.49MB/s difference in read performance between the Legend 970 and the Crucial T700 drive that tops the table.
As you can see from the benchmark result screens we can confirm the official Sequential read/write figures for the 2TB Legend 970 of up to 10,000MB/s with read/write test results of 10,077MB/s and 10,182MB/s respectively.
That Sequential read score sees the drive sitting between the Gigabyte AORUS Gen 5 10000 and the Seagate FireCuda 540. Its write score, however, is the slowest of the three drives running the Phison E26 controller bus at around 1600MT/s rather than the nearer 2000MT/s of the three fastest drives.
Using the Peak Performance profile of the CrystalDiskMark benchmark we could confirm the official 4K random read/write figures for the drive of up to 1,400,000 IOPS and even bettered them especially when it came to random writes. The best test result we saw for random reads was 1,494,543 IOPS while the best write figure was 1,640,966 IOPS, some 240,966 IOPS faster than the official maximum.
With the Peak Performance profile could once again confirm the official Sequential performance figures with the drive sitting in last place on the chart.
ADATA's Legend 970 sits between the Seagate Firecuda 540 and the Gigabyte AORUS Gen 5 10000 in the Real World Profile performance chart. It has a faster read score than the Gigabyte drive but its write performance is slower than both it and the Seagate drive.
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage system performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously.
Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturer's RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.
We are using version 4.1 for our NVMe disk tests.
Using the ATTO benchmark we couldn't get close to the official maximum read figure of 10,000MB/s with a test result of 8,890MB/s. The write test result was much closer to the official 10,000MB/s at 9,500MB/s.
Using the ATTO benchmark, the Legend 970 write performance peaked at the 128KB mark at 9.530MB/s and plateaued around that point for the rest of the test up to an I/O size of 8MB. The read performance levelled off between the 256KB and 512KB points before dropping from 8,690MB/s (512KB) to 8.150MB/s (1MB) before recovering quickly to peak at 9,380MB/s at 4MB and then staying at that speed until the 8MB mark.
AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read-and-write tests, as well as random read-and-write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. It uses incompressible data samples which many drives struggle with, so results can be viewed as the worst case scenarios.
AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.
In the AS SSD benchmark, the Legend 970 read score of 4534 sees it in between the Gigabyte AORUS Gen5 1000 and Seagate's FireCuda 540. Its write score is a little better at 4902.
We used CrystalDiskMark 8‘s custom settings to test the Sequential read and write performance of the drive through a range of queue depths. The setup for the tests is listed below.
128KB Sequential Read / Write.
Transfer Request Size: 128KB, Thread(s): 1, Outstanding I/O: 1-32.
With this Sequential test, we could confirm the official Sequential read/write ratings for the drive of up to 10,000MB/s with a read result of 10,024MB/s with writes a little faster at 10,161MB/s.
128KB Sequential Read Performance v QD compared.
At QDs 1 & 2, the ADATA Legend 970 sits in a mid-table position, but as the queue depth deepens it slips down the results chart.
128KB Sequential Write Performance v QD compared.
The ADATA Legend 970 sits between the Seagate FireCuda 540 and Gigabyte's AORUS Gen5 10000 for all the tested queue depth results.
We used CrystalDiskMark 8‘s custom settings to test the 4K random read performance of the drive through a range of queue depths. The setup for the tests is listed below.
Transfer Request Size: 4KB, Outstanding I/O: 1-32.
Our four-threaded 4K random read tests couldn't get close to the official maximum of 1,400K IOPS. The best figure we saw was 520,556 IOPS (2,132MB/s) at QD16.
4K Random Read v QD Performance v QD
At QD1 the drive sits in third place behind both Crucial T700 drives but as the queue depth deepens it begins to drop down the chart so by QD4 it sits at the bottom of the results. However, by QD32 it has staged an excellent recovery as it sits on top of the table as the fastest Gen 5 drive we've tested to date at this queue depth using this particular test.
We used CrystalDiskMark 8‘s custom settings to test the 4K random write performance of the drive through a range of queue depths. The setup for the tests is listed below.
Transfer Request Size: 4KB, Outstanding I/O: 1-32.
As with the random read results with our four threaded random write tests, we couldn't get close to the official maximum of 1,400K IOPS. The best we saw from testing was 457,341 IOPS (1,873MB/s) at QD16 before the performance dropped back ever so slightly to finish the test run at 457,086 IOPS (1,872MB/s).
4K Random Write v QD Performance.
At QD1 the drive sits in a mid-table position but at QD2 it has fallen to the foot of the table. However, at QDs 4 and 32 its performance sees it moving up a spot.
We used CrystalDiskMark 8’s custom settings to test the 4K 70/30 mixed read/write performance of the drive through a range of queue depths using a single thread and four threads.
Using the four threaded 4K 70/30 read/write tests, the performance of the 2TB version of the ADATA Legend 970 ranges from 107,113 IOPS (438.7MB/s) at QD1 to 498,356 IOPS (2,041.2MB/s) at QD32. Using a single thread, the test results range from 26,443 IOPS (108.3MB/s) at QD1 up to 176,284 IOPS (722MB/s) at QD32.
We used CrystalDiskMark 8 to test the random performance of the drive at lower queue depths (QD1 – QD8 where most of the everyday workloads occur) using 1 to 4 threads.
Random Reads
In the random read (QD1-QD8) tests the drive performed smoothly through all the tested queue depths and number of threads used. At QD1 the performance ranges from 20,764 IOPS (85.05MB/s) using a single thread up to 84,784 IOPS (347.2MB/s) using four threads. At QD8 performance ranges from 502,167 IOPS (2,056MB/s) using four threads down to 159,167 IOPS (651MB/s) using a single thread.
Random Writes
In the 4K write tests the performance rose sharply from QD1 to QD2 for all four tested threads with the fastest rises seen in the three and four-threaded tests. However, all four threads saw the performance levelling off from QD2 until the end of the test at QD8.
In our read-throughput tests, the performance of the 2TB ADATA Legend 970 climbed smoothly through the block marks until it reached the 1MB block where the performance dropped from 7,646MB/s to 5,176MB/s at the 2MB mark before recovering to finish the test run peaking at 7,469MB/s, which is some way off the official maximum rating of 10,000MB/s.
That Sequential read throughput test result sees the drive just above the Gigabyte AORUS Gen5 10000drive.
During the write test run, the performance of the Legend 970 momentarily levels between blocks 128KB and 256KB then drops from 8,654MB/s to 7,589MBs between 1MB and 2MB. The drive recovers well to peak at 9,928.71MB (8MB) before dropping back to finish the test run at 9,671.41MB/s.
As with the read throughput test result, the peak write result of 9,928.71MB is short of the official maximum of 10,000MB/s but at least it is a lot closer to the official figure than the read result.
The PCMark 10 Full System Drive Benchmark uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and common tasks to fully test the performance of the fastest modern drives. The benchmark is designed to measure the performance of fast system drives using the SATA bus at the low end and devices connected via PCI Express at the high end.
The goal of the benchmark is to show meaningful real-world performance differences between fast storage technologies such as SATA, NVMe, and Intel’s Optane. The Full System Drive Benchmark uses 23 traces, running 3 passes with each trace. It typically takes an hour to run.
Traces used:
Booting Windows 10.
Adobe Acrobat – starting the application until usable.
Adobe Illustrator – starting the application until usable Adobe Premiere Pro – starting the application until usable.
Adobe Photoshop – starting the application until usable.
Battlefield V – starting the game until the main menu.
Call of Duty Black Ops 4 – starting the game until the main menu.
Overwatch – starting the game until the main menu.
Using Adobe After Effects.
Using Microsoft Excel.
Using Adobe Illustrator.
Using Adobe InDesign.
Using Microsoft PowerPoint.
Using Adobe Photoshop (heavy use).
Using Adobe Photoshop (light use).
cp1 Copying 4 ISO image files, 20 GB in total, from a secondary drive to the target drive (write test).
cp2 Making a copy of the ISO files (read-write test).
cp3 Copying the ISO to a secondary drive (read test).
cps1Copying 339 JPEG files, 2.37 GB in total, to the target drive (write test).
cps2 Making a copy of the JPEG files (read-write test).
cps3 Copying the JPEG files to another drive (read test).
The 2TB Legend 970 averaged 267MB/s for the six Adobe startup traces, the fastest being Premiere Pro at 387MB/s. With the Adobe usage traces, the drive averaged 665MB/s including the fastest test trace, the Adobe Photoshop heavy usage trace which produced a test result of 1,436MB/s.
When it came to the three gaming traces (Battlefield V, Call Of Duty Black Ops 4 and Overwatch) the drive averaged 1,007MB/s for the three with the fastest being the Battlefield V test at 1,334MB/s.
The 2TB Legend 670 averaged 3,747MB/s for the six file transfer tests, the fastest of which was the cp1 Write test at 6,947MB/s.
With an overall bandwidth figure of 739.71MB/s, the Legend 970 sits in last place in the results chart but there isn't much to choose between all the drives really as only 26MB/s separates the fastest drive from the slowest.
The 3DMark Storage Benchmark uses traces recorded from popular games and gaming-related activities to measure real-world gaming performance.
Traces used:
Battlefield V
Loading Battlefield™ V from launch to the main menu.
Call of Duty Black Ops 4
Loading Call of Duty®: Black Ops 4 from launch to the main menu.
Overwatch
Loading Overwatch® from launch to the main menu.
Game Move
Copying the Steam folder for Counter-Strike®: Global Offensive from an external SSD to the system drive.
Game Recording
Recording a 1080p gameplay video at 60 FPS with OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) while playing Overwatch®.
Installing Game
Installing The Outer Worlds® from the Epic Games Launcher.
Game Saving
Saving progress in The Outer Worlds game.
In 3DMark’s Storage Test, the 2TB Legend 970 had an average game loading bandwidth figure for the three games ( Battlefield V, Call Of Duty Black Ops 4 and Overwatch) of 1,058MB/s with an average access time of 50.3µs.
In the game moving, recording, installing and saving test traces the drive averaged 1,613.81MB/s with an average access time of 33µs for the four tests.
The 2TB Legend 970 averaged 824.3MB/s for the benchmark run which puts it in a mid-point spot in the results chart.
The Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Official Benchmark uses actual maps and playable characters to assign a score to your PC and rate its performance including scene loading times.
The benchmark gives an overall load time as well as loading times by scene.
The ADATA Legend 970 does a pretty decent job in the Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Official Benchmark. It doesn't top any of the load results charts and even sits bottom of the Scene 3 and Scene 4 charts but still manages to be faster overall than the Seagate FireCuda 540.
We took note of the drive’s temperature during some of our benchmarking runs.
ADATA's Legend 970 not only has a chunky aluminium heatsink but for extra cooling, it has a tiny built-in fan. On top of that the cooling fins have had a surface crystallization treatment to increase the overall air contact area. The combination works well although you can hear the fan from time to time, it's certainly not a wailing banshee that some tiny fans tend to be. During our benchmarking runs, the hottest the drive got was 60° C during the CrystalDiskMark 8 default write test. It averaged 48.3° C for the non-4K tests.
For the 4K-based tests, the MP700 PRO averaged 40.33°C.
To test the real-life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of drive reading from & writing to a 2TB Kingston KC3000.
Transfer Details
Windows 10 backup – 118GB.
Data file – 100GB.
BluRay Movie – 42GB.
File folder – 50GB – 28,523 files.
Steam folder – 222GB (8 games: Alien Isolation, Battlefield 4, BioShock Infinite, Crysis 3, Grand Theft Auto V, Shadow Of Mordor, Skyrim, The Witcher3 Wild Hunt).
Movie demos 8K – 21GB – (11 demos).
Raw Movie Clips 4K – 16GB – (9 MP4V files).
Movie folder – 12GB – 15 files – (8 @ .MKV, 4 @ .MOV, 3 @ MP4).
Photo Folder – 10GB – 304 files – (171 @ .RAW, 105 @ JPG, 21 @ .CR2, 5 @ .DNG).
Audio Folder – 10GB – 1,483 files – (1479 @ MP3, 4 @ .FLAC files).
Single large image – 5GB – 1.5bn pixel photo.
3D Printer File Folder – 4.25GB – (166 files – 105 @ .STL, 38 @ .FBX, 11 @ .blend, 5 @ .lwo, 4 @ .OBJ, 3@ .3ds).
AutoCAD File Folder – 1.5GB (80 files – 60 @ .DWG and 20 @.DXF).
The drive averaged 2,362MB/s when writing the 13 transfer tests with the fastest being the 7,214MB/s for the 4K Movie Clips folder file and the slowest being the 230MB/s for the 10GB Photo folder. Reading back the data the average was 5,171MB/s. The fastest transfer was the 5GB image file at 5,938MB/s with the slowest, the 50GB File Folder at 1,668MB/s
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.
