This review looks at the ADATA Legend 970, which is the first PCI-Express 5.0 solid-state drive from the company. The ADATA Legend 970 already has a cooler installed, and that heatsink has a tiny fan built in to help move air. The ADATA Legend 970, like all other “Gen 5” SSDs on the market right now, is based on the Phison E26 controller, which is the only controller on the market right now that works with the new interface. Other companies like Samsung, WD, Kioxia, Silicon Motion, and Innogrit are working on their own designs, but they don’t have anything to show for it yet. Micron’s newest B58R 3D TLC NAND with 232 layers is used in the ADATA drive’s NAND flash. As you would expect from a high-end drive, it has a DRAM cache chip.
ADATA Legend 970: Description
The ADATA Legend 970 is one of the first solid-state drives (SSDs) to use the PCI Express 5.0 interface. It is a high-performance SSD. It is much faster than the SSDs that came before it, which makes it perfect for demanding applications like gaming, video editing, and making creative content. The Phison E26 controller and Micron 232-layer 3D TLC NAND flash memory are used to make the Legend 970. It comes in 1 TB and 2 TB sizes and can read and write sequentially at up to 14,000 MB/s and 14,000 MB/s, respectively.
Random read and write IOPS performance is also very high, with up to 1,400,000 IOPS for both read and write. A heatsink is already built into the Legend 970. This helps keep the drive cool when it’s being used. The heatsink has two layers, extruded aluminum fins, and a small fan built right in. Compared to a heatsink without a fan, this active heat dissipation system can lower temperatures by up to 10%. The Legend 970 has great performance and cooling, and it also has a number of other features that make it a great choice for power users.
ADATA Legend 970: Pricing
Amazon is currently selling the ADATA Legend 970 for $385 for 1TB and $567 for 2TB. Prices are very high, but it’s likely that’s because the drive just came out. In time, the price should get closer to what its competitors are charging. The guarantee on the drive is only good for 5 years.
Specifications Table
The ADATA LEGEND 970 2TB Gen5 x4 SSD goes into our processor easily, and it’s easy to screw it down. The SSD is not heavy, and it does not make the slot heavier. In a computer build, the industrial and mechanical styles look great.
| Feature | Specifications |
|---|---|
| Brand | ADATA |
| Capacity | 1000GB / 2000GB |
| Interface | PCIe Gen5 x4 |
| NAND Flash | 3D NAND |
| Controller | Phison PS5026 E26 |
| Sequential Read (Max) | Up to 10,000MB/s |
| Sequential Write (Max) | Up to 10,000MB/s |
| Terabytes Written (TBW) Rating | 1400 TBW |
| Form factor | M.2 2280 |
| MTBF | 1,600,000 hours |
| Firmware | EQFM22.0 |
| Warranty | 5-year limited warranty |
| Check Price |
ADATA Legend 970: Design
The Legend 970 is a solid-state drive with four lanes and a PCI Express 5.0 bus that uses the NVMe 2.0 standard. This internal SSD has two sides and comes in the usual “gumstick” M.2 Type-2280 format. The drive uses Micron’s new Gen 5-optimized PS5026-E26 driver and 232-layer 3D TLC NAND chips. If these core numbers look familiar, it’s because we’ve seen them in all of the other Gen 5 SSDs we’ve looked at so far: the Gigabyte Aorus 10000, the Crucial T700, the Corsair MP700, and the Seagate FireCuda 540.
The 970 has a dual-layer aluminium metal fan built into an M.2 heatsink as part of its own active cooling system. For the fan to work, the heatsink has a cable with a SATA connector that plugs into a free SATA connector lead on your power source. If everything else is the same, an SSD with a good cooling system should work better than one with a less good one. For one thing, high temperatures can cause thermal throttling, which is a safety feature built into the running software of an SSD that slows it down if it is at risk of overheating for a long time.
ADATA Legend 970: Features
The ADATA Legend 970 uses a link called PCIe Gen5 x4 and follows the NVMe 2.0 standard. Both reads and writes are said to be 10,000MB/s. This means that, in theory, the Gen5 drive is about twice as fast as a PCIe Gen4 drive and six times as fast as a PCIe Gen3 drive. The SSD works with PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 systems, but it would be a waste to pay the higher price the drive asks for those slots. Reads and writes at random can reach up to 1,400,000 IOPS. The average time between failures (MTBF) is 1.6 million hours, and the total bytes written (TBW) is up to 1,400TB. The Legend 970 has an SLC cache algorithm and a DRAM Cache Buffer, which are meant to help the system load faster and catch more data.
ADATA is very proud of its active air-cooling system and names it as the SSD’s most unique feature. The air-cooling system is made up of a double-layer aluminum alloy cooler with a surface crystallization and a built-in micro fan. All of this should make the temperature 10 percent lower than with heatsinks that don’t have fans. This should help keep high-speed operation steady over a long period of time. For computer slots that don’t have a heatsink, it’s helpful to have a powered heatsink. If not, this unit can be taken out if it is not needed.
ADATA Legend 970: Performance
To get the most out of a PCI-Express 5.0 SSD, you need a motherboard and CPU that support it. Both AMD and Intel’s newest models have this feature. If you only have PCIe Gen4 or Gen3, the ADATA LEGEND 970 will still work, but you will get the most out of it with a PCIe Gen5 machine. With the ADATA LEGEND 970, you can choose between a 1TB and a 2TB storage. The sequential, random, and IOPS read/write performance scores for both capacities are the same.
The ADATA LEGEND 970 is an M.2 2280 SSD that supports PCIe Gen5 x4 and NVMe 2.0. It has TLC 3D NAND flash memory as well as SLC and DRAM caches. It has a Micron 232-Layer 3D flash memory and a Phison PS5026 E26 processor. The ADATA LEGEND 970 can read and write at up to 10,000MB/s in a straight line. Both the 4K Random Read IOPS and the 4K Random Write IOPS are rated at up to 1,400K. It can last for a good 1,400TB (TBW) and 1.6M hours (MTBF). ADATA offers a limited protection of 5 years.
Gen5 game performance and high-performance PCs often choose the Phison E26 controller. The Phison E26 is an NVMe 2.0-compliant 8-channel driver that works best with the PCIe Gen5x4 interface. It is compatible with ONFI 5.0 and TOGLE 5.0. With a capacity of up to 4TB and flash transfer speeds of up to 2,400MT/s, it operates at a speed of 14GB/s. It can transfer data at a rate of up to 3200Mbp/s and is compatible with both LPDDR4 and DDR4. It supports Phison’s ECC LDPC engine and coding technique, as well as AES 256, SHA 512, RSA 4096, and TCG Opal.
ADATA Legend 970: Pros and Cons
Users who want the fastest and most reliable SSD on the market should choose the ADATA Legend 970. It is perfect for tasks that require a lot of power, like gaming, video editing, and making creative content.
Pros
- Fast sequential read and write speeds in testing
- Runs cool at 10,000 MB/s
- Effective air-cooled heatsink
- 2nd Fastest Drive Available
Cons
- Requires compatible late-model motherboard and CPU
Final Words
The ADATA Legend 970 is one of the more powerful Gen5 drives. Since the drive costs over $200 more than the Firecuda 540, the small boost in speed isn’t very appealing. Since the speed of these two SSDs is so close, it’s hard to make a case for the Legend 970. We think the price is high because it just came out, so we hope it will go down as sales go up and the excitement of the start wears off.
