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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.
The XPG Mars 980 Blade comes in a pretty compact box with a decent image of the drive on the front showing the drive and the separate heatsink. Above the image are four icons displaying: speed rating, that the drive has a DRAM cache buffer, is compatible with laptops and works with PS5. Under the image is a sticker carrying the drive's capacity.
The rear of the box has a small multilingual list of the drive's features and an icon displaying that the drive comes with a 5-year warranty.
The 2TB Mars 980 Blade is built on a single-sided format.
On one side of the PCB sits the Silicon Motion SM2508 controller, along with a 2GB LPDDR4-2666MHz DRAM IC (Samsung K4A8G16 5WC-BCTD) and two 1TB 232-layer NAND packages (Micron B58R NAND (rebranded as ADATA 600799DG). Silicon Motion's SM2508 is an 8-channel controller built on a 6nm process using a quad-core 32-bit Arm Cortex-R8 processor running at 1.25GHz in conjunction with a single 32-bit Cortex-M0. The eight NAND channels support speeds of up to 3,600 MT/s.
The XPG Mars 980 Blade comes with an optional stick-on heat spreader.
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
Biwin Black Opal X570 PRO 4TB
Biwin Black Opal X570 PRO 2TB
ADATA Legend 970 2TB
Corsair MP700 PRO SE 4TB
Corsair MP700 PRO 2TB
Corsair MP700 PRO XT 2TB
Corsair MP700 Elite 2TB
Corsair MP700 Micro 4TB
Crucial T705 2TB
Crucial T700 2TB
Crucial T700 with Heatsink 2TB
Gigabyte AORUS 10000 2TB
Kingston Fury Renegade G5 2TB
Kioxia Exceria Plus G4 2TB
Klevv Genuine G360 2TB
Netac NV150HK 2TB
Samsung SSD 9100 PRO 2TB
Seagate FireCuda 520 2TB
SanDisk WD Black SN8100 2TB
Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark 4 & 5.
CrystalMark 8.0.0.
AS SSD 2.0.
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 behaviour query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.
CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSDs. We are using v8.0.5.
In CrystalDiskMark 8's 4K QD1 T1 test, the ADATA XPG Mars 980 Blade 2TB sits at the bottom of the table with a read result of 81.37MB/s backed up with a write score of 264.12MB/s, the read figure just short of the previous generation ADATA Legend 970 read performance. The write performance of the Mars 980, however, is a fair bit slower than the Legend 970.
As you can see from the benchmark result screens, we can confirm the official Sequential read/write figures for the 2TB XPG Mars 980 Blade and better them a little. At 14,589MB/s, the read result is a 589MB/s improvement over the official figure, while the write result of 13,497MB/s shows a 497MB/s bettering over the official figure.
That Sequential read score sees the drive sitting in fifth place on the results chart, some 4,512MB/s faster than the previous generation Legend 970. Write performance sees a 3,315MB/s improvement.
Peak Performance profile
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 2,000,000 IOPS, with a test result of 2,025,531 IOPS. Write performance sees a test result of 1,716,514 IOPS, an improvement of 66,514 IOPS over the official maximum figure. The read figure sees the drive sitting in third place in the table.
With the Peak Performance profile could once again confirm the official Sequential performance figures with the drive sitting in fifth place on the chart.
Real World profile
Using CrystalDiskMark 8's Real World Profile test, the read result of 5,975MB/s sees the drive in the bottom half of the table, 2,731MB/s behind the previous generation Legend 970. However, the latest drive has better write performance.
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage system's performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customise 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. ATTO uses RAW or compressible data.
We are using version 4.1 for our NVMe disk tests with a set length of 256mb and testing both the read and write performance.
Using the ATTO benchmark, we couldn't get close to the official maximum read figure of 14,000MB/s with a test result of 12,030MB/s. The write test result was even further away from the official 13,000MB/s at 7,560MB/s. These test results have more to do with the benchmark rather than the drive, as shown by the ATTO 5 results below.
ATTO 5
ATTO 5 has new features, enhancements and changes which allow it to benchmark modern SSDs more thoroughly than previous versions.
Switching to ATTO 5, we got test results of 14,930MB/s and 13,420MB/s for read and writes, respectively, confirming both official maximums. There was a dip in performance for both reads and writes (larger for reads) at the 1MB I/O size, but the drive recovered quickly from it.
AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benchmarking 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 it is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.
In the AS SSD benchmark, the XPG Mars 980 Blade read score of 4994 sees it slip into the top ten in the results chart. Its write score is much stronger at 6279.
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.
Transfer Request Size: 128KB, Thread(s): 1, Outstanding I/O: 1-32.
128KB Sequential Read / Write.
With this Sequential test, we could confirm the official Sequential read/write ratings for the drive of up to 14,000MB/s and up to 13,000MB/s, respectively, with a peak read result of 14,578MB/s with writes at 13,492MB/s.
128KB Sequential Read v QD performance.
The best performance from the XPG Mars 980 Blade came at QD32; its score of 14,578.3MB/s puts it into fifth position in the results chart.
128KB Sequential Write v QD performance.
At QDs 1 & 4, the ADATA XPG Mars 980 Blade sits in the lower half of the results chart; at QD4, it sits in last place. However, at QDs 2 and 32, the drive sits in the top 5 of the charts.
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
Using our four-threaded 4K random read tests, we couldn't get close to the official maximum of 2,000K IOPS. The best figure we saw was 570,312 IOPS (2,335MB/s), coming at the end of the test run at QD32.
4K Random Read v QD Performance
At QDs 1, 2, and 4, the drive sits in the lower half of the results table. But at QD32, the drive shoots up the table to sit in fourth place.
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 1,650,000 IOPS. The best we saw from testing was 518,290 IOPS (2,122MB/s) at QD32.
4K Random Write v QD Performance
At QD1, the drive sits in the penultimate position on the chart, while at QDs 2 and 4, it drops into last place. But as with the random read performance at QD32, the drive shot up the table into third position.
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.
In the four-threaded 4K 70/30 read/write tests, the performance of the 2TB ADATA XPG Mars 980 Blade ranges from 75,227 IOPS (308.13MB/s) at QD1 to 549,305 IOPS (2,249,95 MB/s) at QD32. Dropping to a single thread, the performance ranges from 25,076 IOPS (102.71MB/s) at QD1 up to 209,488 IOPS (858.06MB/s) at QD32. With a single thread, the performance seems to slow down between QD2 and QD4 with a corresponding large spike in the latency, but the drive quickly recovers and accelerates up to QD16, where the performance starts to plateau out until the end of the test run.
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
QD1 read performance for the 2TB XPG Mars 980 Blade ranged from 19,530 IOPS (79.99MB/s) using a single thread up to 65,513 IOPS (268.34MB/s) using three threads. At the end of the test at Queue Depth 8, the single thread performance had risen to 109,735 IOPS (449.47MB/s) while with three threads the figure rose to 368,343 IOPS (1,508.73MB/s).
Random Writes
In the 4K write tests, performance rose sharply from QD1 to QD2 across all four tested threads, with the fastest increases observed in the three- and four-threaded tests. Using 1,2, and 3 threads, the performance began to plateau, but with four threads, the performance accelerated and kept climbing even at the end of the test run.
In our read-throughput test, the 2TB ADATA XPG Mars 980 Blade peaked at 9,086.12MB/s at the 8MB block mark, some way off the official maximum of 14,000MB/s.
Although the test result of 9086.12MB/s is some way off the official maximum, it is still good enough to put the drive into the top ten and is 1,439MB/s faster than the previous generation Legend 970.
In the write throughput test, the drive produced a peak test result of 11,646.90MB/s (16MB block), some way off the official maximum of 13,000MB/s.
Its test result of 11,646.90MB/s may be 1,354MB/s from the official maximum, but it's still good enough to put it into fifth position in the results chart. It is also 1,718.19MB/s faster than the previous generation Legend 970 drive.
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 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).
Using PCMark10's Full System Drive Benchmark, the six Adobe startup traces produced an average of 249MB/s, with the fastest being the Adobe Premiere Pro startup trace at 328MB/s, the slowest, the Lightroom startup at 193MB/s. For the five usage traces, the drive averaged 467.8MB/s. The fastest test was, as usual, the Photoshop heavy usage trace at 926MB/s, the slowest, the InDesign test at 180MB/s.
The three gaming traces produced an average result of 655MB/s, the fastest being Battlefield V at 856MB/s. Then came Call Of Duty Black Ops 4 at 736MB/s and finally Overwatch at 373MB/s. When it came to the six file transfers, the drive averaged 3,136MB/s with the fastest being the cp1 Write test at 6,197MB/s.
Looking at the overall bandwidth figure of 530.44MB/s, it appears that ADATA's XPG Mars 980 Blade drive doesn't handle the rigours of the PCMark 10 benchmark that well.
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 Benchmark game loading tests, the XPG Mars 980 Blade averaged 667.18MB/s with an average access time of 75.6µs. The fastest loading in terms of bandwidth came from the Battlefield V trace at 902.68MB/s (78µs).
In the game, moving, recording, installing and saving test traces, the drive averaged 1,128.28MB/s, which puts the drive in the penultimate position on the results table, although there isn't much to separate the bottom three. The average access time for the four tests was 55µs.
The overall average bandwidth figure for the 2TB ADATA XPG Mars 980 Blade is 483.55MB/s, which is a little disappointing as it's only good enough to see the drive in last place of the results table.
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 2TB ADATA XPG Mars 980 Blade doesn't seem to handle the Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Official Benchmark very well as it sits in penultimate position in three of the charts and in last place in two, including the overall total loading time chart. Its best performance comes in the Scene 1 load test, where it sits fifth from the bottom of the table.
We took note of the drive’s temperature during some of our benchmarking runs. The ADATA XPG Mars 980 Blade 2TB comes with an optional stick-on heatsink. Unlike the previous generation Legend 970, which uses active cooling, the advances in controller and NAND technologies make this unnecessary, hence the thin optional heatsink. The hottest the Mars 980 Blade got during the benchmark runs was 59°C during CrystalDiskMark 8 default Write and Peak Performance 0 fill Write tests. It averaged 51°C for the bulk of our testing and 45°C for the 4K-based tests.
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
Data file – 100GB.
BluRay Movie – 42GB.
Windows 11 iso – 5.4GB.
File folder – 50GB – 28,523 files.
Movie demos 8K – 21GB – (11 demos).
Raw Movie Clips 4K – 16GB – (9 MP4V files).
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)
In our real-life file transfer tests, the 2TB ADATA XPG Mars 980 Blade averaged 3,993MB/s for the eleven tests when writing data. The fastest performance came from the 100GB data file transfer at 6,483MB/s (17secs), while the slowest (as usual) was the 50GB file folder transfer at 494MB/s (125 secs). When it came to reading the data, the drive averaged 4,877MB/s, with the fastest transfer being the 4K Raw Movie Clip folder at 6,054MB/s.
XPG are ADATA's gaming arm, and the latest addition to its range of M.2 SSDs is the Gen 5 Mars 980, available with both active (980 PRO) and passive (980 Blade) cooling solutions. ADATA supplied us with a 980 Blade for this review. At the time of writing this review, the Mars 980 Blade is available in three capacities: 1TB, 2TB and a flagship 4TB model.
The ADATA XPG Mars 980 Blade uses a combination of a Silicon Motion SM2508 controller and 232-Layer Micron B58R TLC NAND. The Silicon Motion SM2508 is an 8-channel controller supporting NAND (ONFI 5.0 and Toggle 5.0) transfer speeds of up to 3,600 MT/s per channel. Built on a 6nm process, it uses a quad-core 32-bit Arm Cortex-R8 processor running at 1.25GHz in conjunction with a single 32-bit Cortex-M0. It supports both DDR4 and LPDDR4 DRAM up to 3,200MT/s.
It has full drive AES 256 encryption and supports TCG Opal 2.0, Hardware SHA 256/384 and TRNG security protocols. Because of the 6nm build process, it can offer high performance together with lower power consumption.
ADATA rates the sequential read / write performance of the 2TB drive as up to 14,000MB/s and 13,000MB/s, respectively. All three drives have the 14,000MB/s rating. The 1TB drive gets a write rating of up to 10,000MB/s, while the 4TB drive gets the same 13,000MB/s figure as the 2TB. 4K random read performance for the range is quoted as up to 1,600K IOPS for the 1TB drive, 2,000K IOPS for the 2TB drive and 1,950K IOPS for the 4TB drive. Write performance is the same up to 1,650K IOPS across all three drives.
Using the ATTO 4 benchmark, we couldn't get close to the maximum official sequential read/write figures of 14,000MB/s and 13,000MB/s, respectively. However, switching over to the more up-to-date ATTO 5, we could confirm the official figures with test results of 14,930MB/s and 13,420MB/s for reads and writes, respectively. We could also confirm the official Sequential figures and, as with ATTO 5, better them a little, using the CrystalDiskMark 8 default benchmark with a best read result of 14,589MB/s and a best write figure of 13,497MB/s.
When it comes to 4K random performance, the 2TB XPG Mars 980 Blade drive is rated as up to 2,000,000 IOPS for reads and up to 1,650,000 IOPS for writes. Using our 4-threaded tests, we couldn't get close to this figure with the best test results of 570.312 IOPS and 518,290 IOPS for reads and writes, respectively. Using CrystalDiskMark 8's Peak Performance default profile benchmark, we could confirm the official read figure with a peak test result of 2,025,531 IOPS with writes at 1,716,514 IOPS.
The previous generation Gen 5 drive we looked at, the Legend 970, used an active air cooling solution to keep the drive cool. It's a sign of how far controller and NAND technologies have come since the Legend 970 that the Blade version of the Mars 980 comes with an optional thin stick-on heat spreader. The heat spreader works pretty well, given the hottest we saw the drive get was 59°C during CrystalDiskMark 8's default Write and Peak Performance 0 fill Write tests.
We found the 2TB ADATA XPG Mars Blade for £195.49 on Box HERE.
Pros
- Fast Sequential Performance.
- Optional heat sink.
- AES 256-bit hardware-based encryption.
Cons
- Couldn't hit the official maximum speeds in some of our testing.
KitGuru says: ADATA's latest generation Gen 5 SSD uses up-to-date controller and NAND technologies to good effect, combining fast performance, cool running and power efficiency.
