ADATA Legend 970 Pro PCIe Gen5 x4 M.2 SSD Review

A Closer Look

ADATA is well known for some of the best storage devices on the market, and my first impression is that this is one of the best I’ve ever seen. The design just grabs you, it’s an understated look, but you can just tell it’s a quality product from the general look and feel of it.

What’s interesting is that it comes with a pretty large heatsink that will help ensure it can deliver the best performance. Gen5 drives can quickly thermal throttle without proper cooling, but the Legend has a secret weapon. There’s a tiny fan built into the heatsink that will help keep things even cooler, which is pretty awesome.

The heatsink fully encloses the drive too, with a metal backplate fully protecting the PCB.

The drive itself is packed, with the InnoGrit controller (on the right), a fast LPDDR$ DRAM cache (middle) and two NAND chips (left).

What is interesting is that there are chips on both sides, this is pretty uncommon for a 1TB drive. Typically you would find two 512GB chips for 1TB on a one-sided PCB, but perhaps using 4 x 256GB chips and double the DRAM is the secret sauce to unlocking the incredible read/write speeds of this drive.

The quality is second to none, and ADATA has equipped both sides of the heatsink with an excellent-quality thermal pad that covers the whole PCB.

It’s the same on the backplate too, with another large pad, but there’s a smaller pad to increase the depth to ensure some of the smaller components are also effectively cooled.