The ADATA Legend 970 (starts at $189.99 for 1TB; $329.99 for 2TB as tested) is not the fastest PCI Express 5.0 solid-state drive we have tested in terms of raw throughput speed, but its benchmark scores are among the best of the Gen 5 SSDs we have reviewed, in a few cases even surpassing the Editors' Choice-winning Crucial T700. The Legend 970 is also the first PCIe 5.0 SSD with an actively air-cooled (fan-based) heatsink we have reviewed, and its cooling system seems to work well enough to minimize or eliminate thermal throttling and maximize performance.
The Design: Standard Gen 5 Innards, Fan-Based Heatsink
The Legend 970 is a four-lane solid-state drive running the NVMe 2.0 protocol over a PCI Express 5.0 bus. This two-sided internal SSD comes in the standard M.2 Type-2280 "gumstick" format. The drive uses Micron 232-layer 3D TLC NAND chips and Phison's new Gen 5-optimized PS5026-E26 controller. If these core specs seem familiar, it's because we have seen them in all of the other Gen 5 SSDs we have thus far reviewed: the Gigabyte Aorus 10000, the Crucial T700, the Corsair MP700, and the Seagate FireCuda 540. (Stymied by some of these terms? Check out our handy guide to SSD jargon.)
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)The 970 comes with its own active cooling system, a dual-layer aluminum alloy fan embedded in an M.2 heatsink. To power the fan, the heatsink has a cable with a SATA connector, which plugs into one of your power supply's free SATA connector leads. All else being equal, an SSD with an effective cooling system should perform better than a model with a less effective one. For one thing, high temperatures can lead to thermal throttling, a protection mechanism built into an SSD's operating software that slows it down if it is in danger of sustained overheating. ADATA claims that the 970's heat dissipation is effective enough to avoid throttling altogether. Based on its results on our benchmark tests in comparison with those of other Gen 5 SSDs, the Legend 970's cooling system seems to work very well. Just be sure the heatsink-equipped drive fits the environs on your motherboard surrounding its PCIe 5.0 slot, and that the board indeed has a Gen 5 M.2 slot. If it doesn't, the drive will revert to PCI Express 4.0 speeds, negating the whole reason you bought this theoretically speedy, premium-priced drive in the first place.
The Legend 970 is available in 1TB and 2TB versions, the same capacities we have seen in most of the other Gen 5 SSDs we have reviewed. (The Editors' Choice-winning Crucial T700 also comes in a 4TB stick.)
At this writing, the Legend 970 was still at least a week away from release to the US market, though it is already offered through Amazon by a third-party vendor at an exorbitant price. You should wait to buy it until after the US release, when its retail price should reflect the list prices/MSRPs mentioned above.
As for durability, expressed in terms of lifetime write capacity in total terabytes written (TBW), the Legend 970 matches the Aorus 10000 and the Corsair MP700, both rated at 700TBW for 1TB and 1,400TBW for 2TB. It edges the Crucial T700, rated at 600TBW and 1,200TBW for 1TB and 2TB, respectively. However, the Seagate FireCuda 540 rules the durability roost among the Gen 5 drives we have tested, with 1,000TBW for the 1TB stick and 2,000 for 2TB.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)A few PCI Express 4.0 drives offer substantially higher durability ratings; the MSI Spatium M470, for example, is rated at 1,600TBW for 1TB and 3,300TBW for 2TB. At the other extreme, the Mushkin Delta, which uses less-durable QLC memory, is rated at just 200TBW for 1TB, 400TBW for 2TB, and 800TBW for 4TB.
The terabytes-written spec is a manufacturer's estimate of how much data can be written to a drive before some cells begin to fail and get taken out of service. ADATA warranties the Legend 970 for five years or until you hit the rated TBW figure in data writes, whichever comes first. But the drive's durability rating is such that unless you're writing huge amounts of data to the SSD, it's a safe bet that the 970 will stay covered for the full warranty period.
The Legend 970 works with ADATA SSD Toolbox, a utility suite that the company offers as a free download. It has a variety of tools, including drive health monitoring, diagnostics, optimization, benchmarking, and backups. The 970 supports AES 256-bit hardware-based encryption, which is the gold standard in data encryption.
System Requirements for PCI Express 5.0 SSDs
The Legend 970 is part of a new generation of SSDs that promises a major speed boost, but you can take advantage of it only if you have recent hardware that supports the standard. Just the very latest boutique desktops are likely to be PCIe 5.0-ready off the shelf, so you may have to build your own PC from the ground up or update an existing system to gain the connectivity. You'll need an Intel 12th Generation Core or later CPU with a motherboard based on Intel's Z690 or Z790 chipset; or a Ryzen 7000 processor with an AM5 motherboard built around an X670, X670E, or B650E chipset.
Know that just because you have one of those chipsets, that doesn't mean the motherboard maker actually implemented a PCIe 5.0-capable M.2 SSD slot. That's up to the board maker, so check your system's or motherboard's specs and documentation to make sure you actually have such a slot before investing in one of these drives.
Testing the Legend 970: Strong 4K Write Results
In benchmarking the Legend 970, we used our latest storage testbed desktop, designed specifically for testing PCIe 5.0 M.2 SSDs. It consists of an ASRock X670E Taichi motherboard with an AMD X670 chipset, 32GB of DDR5 memory (two Crucial 16GB DIMMs), one PCIe 5.0 x4 M.2 slot (with lanes that have direct access to the CPU), and three PCIe 4.0 slots. It sports an AMD Ryzen 9 7900 CPU using an AMD stock cooler and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super card with 8GB of GDDR6 SDRAM; and it is powered by a Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 Snow 750W PSU. The boot drive is an ADATA Legend 850 PCIe 4.0 SSD. All this is housed in a Praxis Wetbench open-frame case.
We put the Legend 970 through our usual slate of internal solid-state drive benchmarks, comprising Crystal DiskMark 6.0, UL's PCMark 10 Storage, and UL's 3DMark Storage Benchmark, the last of which measures a drive's performance in a number of gaming-related tasks.
Crystal DiskMark's sequential speed tests provide a traditional measure of drive throughput, simulating best-case, straight-line transfers of large files. In our Crystal DiskMark testing, the Legend 970 exceeded both its sequential read and write speed ratings, the former by a hair, the latter by just under 2%. That's all we really ask of a drive; the sequential read/write testing serves as a reality check on the manufacturer's claimed speeds. The Aorus 10000, Corsair MP700, and Seagate Firecuda 540 all tallied very similar throughput numbers, while the Crucial T700's tested sequential read speed was 23% faster than the Legend 970, and its write speed 16% faster, in line with its higher rated speeds.
In Crystal DiskMark's 4K speed testing, the Legend 970 had a new high score in read speed, barely edging out the Seagate FireCuda 540 (by just half a percent) and the other PCI Express 5.0 SSDs, all by less than 3%. In 4K write testing, the 970 had the second-highest score among our comparison group, just behind the Acer Predator GM7000, a PCI Express 4.0 drive, and surpassing the other Gen 5 SSDs by between 8% and 12%. Good 4K write performance is especially important for an SSD used as a boot drive, though we test them as secondary drives.
The PCMark 10 Overall Storage test measures a drive's speed in performing a variety of routine tasks such as launching Windows, loading games and creative apps, and copying both small and large files. The Legend 970 came in second among our comparison group, but with a small margin. It was less than 2% behind the Crucial T700, with the other Gen 5 SSDs all lagging the 970 by less than 2%.
As for PCMark 10's subtests, or individual traces, the Legend 970's scores were mostly very similar to those of the other four Gen 5 SSDs we have reviewed, producing middling results compared with our PCIe 4.0 drives. Where the PCI Express 5.0 SSDs really shone, and what clinched their wins in the PCMark 10 Overall results, were the copy test traces. In the ISO (large-file) copy test, the Legend 970 beat out the Crucial T700 by a hair in a closely packed showing by the Gen 5 drives, all of which posted scores more than 20% higher than the best PCIe 4.0 drive. The 970 came in second to the T700 in the small-file copy trace, in another rout in which all the Gen 5 SSDs (closely packed among themselves) posted scores at least 23% higher than the nearest PCI Express 4.0 drive.
Last, the Legend 970 posted a new high score in the 3DMark Storage gaming-centric benchmark, besting the Crucial T700 by just under 2%, and the other Gen 5 drives by slightly more, with the Gen 4 WD Black SN850X breathing down their necks.
Verdict: One Cool, Zippy PCIe 5.0 Stick
The ADATA Legend 970 proved fast for its rated speed, often challenging and in several cases surpassing the Editors' Choice-award-winning Crucial T700. The 970's air-cooled heatsink proved effective, as evidenced by the good benchmark scores, indicating that the drive required little to no thermal throttling to stay within safe thermal limits.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)The T700 has a little more versatility, including the option for a 4TB capacity, while the Legend 970 maxes out at 2TB. And the T700's blazing top throughput speeds put the 970's drag-race speeds to shame, even though in benchmarking real-world tasks, the two SSDs are far more evenly matched.
The Legend 970 is a heatsink-only model. While you can buy the T700 either with a heatsink or without, the T700's heatsink only provides passive cooling. The 970, by contrast, is the first Gen 5 SSD we have reviewed that ships with a fan-cooled, active heatsink attached. If that's your preferred cooling solution, the 970 won't disappoint, though we do hope to see more fan-cooled PCIe 5.0 SSDs to provide a greater variety of options in the future.