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

So, while the 2TB and 4TB versions of this drive have similar read and write speeds, the 1TB version prioritises read speeds. The spec says 13,000 MB/s read and 5800 MB/s write, and it managed to exceed that slightly, so a big thumbs up there.

IOPS look consistent with our expectations, given that I’ve never used a drive with this controller before, but seeing 250K IOPS is definitely a good sign here.

Starting with or smaller file transfer, speeds were pretty decent, with the test-taking just 295ms to complete, it’s very quick indeed.

Moving to larger files, the drive was able to get up to a much higher speed, allowing the test to be completed in just 16 seconds.

The write speeds are capped on this drive, but they do get up to speed very quickly, hitting near max from around 32 KB writes, and it’s extremely consistent all the way up to 64 MB. The read speeds were less consistent though, ramping up towards the 4MB write and then slightly slowing down again, levelling off around 10.3 GB/s for the last few tests. This suggests that even that mighty heatsink might be struggling, and we could hear the fan whirring away in the heatsink.

Overall response times are pretty consistent, again, I didn’t know this controller prior to this review, but it largely seems to be hitting the read and write speeds we expected.

It scored well in AS SSD, keep in mind, AS SSD always comes in with a lower read/write speed than the spec, so this is on par with what I expected to see.

Read speeds were pretty much maxed out throughout this test, but there was a fair bit of fluctuation in the write speeds, but again, this largely sat around 6000 MB/s write, which is basically what the drive is rated for.

If you’re planning to use this drive to record high-resolution uncompressed video, you’re not going to have any problems, as the write speeds are plenty fast. Of course, the much faster read speed is even better if you’re loading high-resolution assets.

For Endwalker, the scene tests were all completed extremely fast, actually, this is one of the fastest total times we’ve ever seen, which isn’t surprising given the massive read speeds on offer here.

For loading, saving, recording, and installing games, you’ll find the speeds are about on par with a Gen4 drive for write, and Gen5 drive for read, but typically it has the faster access times of Gen5 in both regards.

Fortunately, the drive does stay very cool, which is excellent to see, but not surprising given the size of the heatsink and its active cooling solution.