ADATA Legend 970 2 TB

[W1zzard]

ADATA's Legend 970 SSD comes with support for the blazing fast PCI-Express Gen 5 interface, which allows transfer rates of up to 10,000 MB/s. In order to keep the drive cool, ADATA includes a preinstalled heatsink that comes with a tiny little fan, to improve airflow.

Show full review

 

[Chaitanya]

Still not worth it, also these drives are worse than PCI-e 4 drives at launch few years back.

 

[mechtech]

@W1zzard

would it be possible to add another column on your chart bottom of page 3 to include nvme revision?

I see there is quite a few!!

Specifications - NVM Express

NVMe Specifications Overview The NVM Express® (NVMe®) specifications define how host software communicates with non-volatile memory across multiple transports like PCI Express® (PCIe®), RDMA, TCP and more. It is the industry standard for solid state drives (SSDs) in all form factors (U.2, M.2...

nvmexpress.org

NVM Express - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[Chrispy_]

I'm loving the power consumption results that you've added with the spiffy new Quarch appliance.

As impressive as this drive performance is, I'm pretty sure I can design a better passive cooler than that pathetic attempt at an active one.

 

[W1zzard]

to include nvme revision?

Is there any difference that's meaningful for the consumer?

 

[mechtech]

Is there any difference that's meaningful for the consumer?

Hmmm good question. Haven't read through the changelog to see. I have seen recent drives with 1.3, so it shows it's running a dated spec. Now I have something to do on vacation next week

 

[AusWolf]

That SATA power cable looks like I glued it on after 6 pints of beer.

 

[TheDeeGee]

For under a $100 you have a 2TB Gen4 drive, which will be more than fast enough for the coming years.

 

[Kapone33]

They are going to have to really reduce the price of these as just reading through the test results shows that a drive that is 1/2 the price is just as fast feeling in most real world applications. I keep saying this and Kingston is proving it but the most important thing in NAND right now is not Sequential speed but Capacity. We need space to put all of those things. There is also the stark reality that moving files due to Epic's laziness is one of the mitigating factors in having Multiple storage arrays but Windows is restricted to 2.9 GB/s in real tasks. That makes the NV2 an excellent choice AData needs to follow that or they may lose out. The NV2 has gone from $269.99 CAD last week to 309.99 CAD this week for the 4TB version. Especially though when NAND prices have finally become inexpensive.

 

[Wirko]

Still not worth it, also these drives are worse than PCI-e 4 drives at launch few years back.

Gen 4 drives are still struggling to present themselves as clearly superior to Gen 3 drives.

Look at the performance summary in this review. The best Gen 3 drives (Hynix P31 and Samsung 970 EVO Plus) are inferior to Gen 5 by 9 percent; and compared to the best of Gen 4, by 8 percent.

 

[DrCR]

ADATA and Kingston SSDs are prema-banned for me for their shameless bait-and-switch after the reviews come out.

 

[Wirko]

ADATA and Kingston SSDs are prema-banned for me for their shameless bait-and-switch after the reviews come out.

It would be cleverer to aim your wrath not at a specific company but rather at a specific price range. The KC3000? Really hard for Kingston to switch components to QLC NAND, or anything inferior for that matter, and retain the endurance and other specs. The NV2? Well, you get what you get, and try to buy in the same country as a TPU member who was happy to report that he got TLC.

 

[mechtech]

They are going to have to really reduce the price of these as just reading through the test results shows that a drive that is 1/2 the price is just as fast feeling in most real world applications. I keep saying this and Kingston is proving it but the most important thing in NAND right now is not Sequential speed but Capacity. We need space to put all of those things. There is also the stark reality that moving files due to Epic's laziness is one of the mitigating factors in having Multiple storage arrays but Windows is restricted to 2.9 GB/s in real tasks. That makes the NV2 an excellent choice AData needs to follow that or they may lose out. The NV2 has gone from $269.99 CAD last week to 309.99 CAD this week for the 4TB version. Especially though when NAND prices have finally become inexpensive.

The MSI M461 looks like a better warranty and speeds, also $250 for 4TB.......................tempting steam drive.................
4TB only 900TBW whereas the NV2 4TB is 1250TBW

 

[Garrus]

All these PCIe 5.0 drives are useless.

We can see more effect from software changes. GPU decompression and direct to memory loading in Forsaken and Ratchet and Clank is way more impressive than a faster drive.

 

[TheLostSwede]

Hmmm good question. Haven't read through the changelog to see. I have seen recent drives with 1.3, so it shows it's running a dated spec. Now I have something to do on vacation next week

Here you go, quick start for you.

NvME 1.3 vs NvME 1.4 - What are the differences?

In this article we explain the differences between NvME 1.3 vs NvME 1.4. The bottlenecks of the previous generation and so on. Read on.

computertechnicians.com.au

NVMe 2.0 Specification Released: Major Reorganization

www.anandtech.com

 

[Chrispy_]

PCIe 5.0 drives are not cost-effective yet, and to those saying that this is overpriced and unnecessary, you are right - because these drives aren't for you.

If you're a consumer doing anything other than 8K RAW video editing, a last-gen, budget, DRAMless PCIe 3.0 x2 drive like the SN550 with its paltry 2.4GB/s performance will be almost indistinguishable from anything faster in day-to-day use. Without running a synthetic sequential SSD utility like CrystalDiskMark you'd never know that your SSD was behind the curve.

So who is this drive for? It's hard to generalise, but if you REGULARLY need to read and write large, sequential datasets and you are sure the SSD is your bottleneck, then you are the target audience. Even if you edit 8K RAW footage, unless you do it REGULARLY, you're not going to care. Premiere and VEGAS both have software inefficiencies and I've seen both of them fail to max out the 25Gbit NIC when pulling files from an enterprise all-flash array. You likely need to have a very-specific task that needs sequential throughput and that's not a common enough requirement to generalise it into a category of user, or workload.

TL;DR, you don't need the speed unless you know exactly WHY you need the speed. If you think your SSD is slow, it's highly unlikely that your SSD is the real bottleneck.

 

[chrcoluk]

Is this drive faster than the famous 970 pro at filling the whole drive, thats no longer on the TPU sustained write charts.

 

[I_Want_Answers]

Give PCIe 5.0 another year to mature. Better yet, don't bother with it unless you frequently have to transfer terabytes of data at a moment's notice. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but other than upcoming more widespread support for DirectStorage, there's no practical benefit to 5 over 4 at the moment for the average user / gamer.

 

[lightning70]

The speed is really extraordinary, but I don't think there is a need for such high speed in real use yet.
I have the Kingston NV2 and it's pretty good for me.

 

[AnarchoPrimitiv]

It's a shame that with respect to user experience, we ALREADY had the huge leap in performance we wanted with a previous, "failed", product: Intel Optane. To this day, if somebody offered me the choice between an Intel 905p or any PCIe 5.0 SSD as a boot disk, I'd take the 905p. Optane offered the drastic improvements to low queue depth random reads and writes that actually has a meaningful impact on user experience, whereas on typical flash based NVMe drives, the random r/w performance has for all intents and purposes stagnated since PCIe 3.0 NVMe drives. I was hoping this new 232 layer NAND would produce some meaningful improvements in this area, but I have yet to see any compelling data toward that end.

 

[mechtech]

Is there any difference that's meaningful for the consumer?

Thought about it and the average consumer probably not. As long as it works. However perhaps warranty and endurance since it’s tied to warranty and life would be better metrics to add to the chart on page 3?

 

[chrcoluk]

It's a shame that with respect to user experience, we ALREADY had the huge leap in performance we wanted with a previous, "failed", product: Intel Optane. To this day, if somebody offered me the choice between an Intel 905p or any PCIe 5.0 SSD as a boot disk, I'd take the 905p. Optane offered the drastic improvements to low queue depth random reads and writes that actually has a meaningful impact on user experience, whereas on typical flash based NVMe drives, the random r/w performance has for all intents and purposes stagnated since PCIe 3.0 NVMe drives. I was hoping this new 232 layer NAND would produce some meaningful improvements in this area, but I have yet to see any compelling data toward that end.

Yeah Optane was a good product, but Intel never managed to convince the public, marketing can often be the life or death of a product. Intel are also notoriously impatient, they really didnt give it very long. Standard SSD's were around a while before taking off.

For me I do agree with most points already made, Gen 5 has two main issues, it isnt needed, we have found out it even has no real advantage (yet) over gen 4 for directstorage. and very little over gen 3. The second issue being that these products being released now, they under developed and not ready, they really need a more efficient controller that can do gen 5 sustained speeds without using more power than gen 4 controllers which would also solve the cooling problem. They effectively seem like beta products.

One thing as well not seen tested is what happens when using one of these drives in gen 3 or 4 mode, do they run lots cooler and with loads less power (as was the case when using gen 4 drives in gen 3 mode). Or is the controller that bad that even in gen 4 mode they run hotter and consume more power than native gen 4 drives.

 

[Mussels]

I wonder what compelled them to use the "970" name when it's been used by samsung in the same market segment, and will only make people think of that older product

Still not worth it, also these drives are worse than PCI-e 4 drives at launch few years back.

depends on what metric you care about, if you need sustained writes this sorta leads the pack by just a tiny bit

There are so, so many performance metrics to compare these drives by with 4K reads/writes, the latencies and so on.



Not surprisingly, the highest performance drives are the highest power draw too, with the biggest cooling needs. 7.5W isn't much for a desktop user, but when other models are at the 1W mark, they'd certainly be a poor choice for a laptop or a console, even without the complication of powering that fan.

Why the heck doesn't it simply have a 4 pin PWM cable? Motherboard fan headers are usually rather close to the NVME slots, and they could throw in a sata->fan cable in the box and make it quieter and less clunky.


@W1zzard Did your photos happen to include the fan? curious about it's specs (size, voltage, amps) in case someone wants to replace it or rewire it

 

[Deleted member 232534]

One thing as well not seen tested is what happens when using one of these drives in gen 3 or 4 mode, do they run lots cooler and with loads less power (as was the case when using gen 4 drives in gen 3 mode). Or is the controller that bad that even in gen 4 mode they run hotter and consume more power than native gen 4 drives.

yes, this is interesting

 

[deu]

Kinda ironic to see a NVMe utilize the old SATA power connector. 2 steps forward.... 1 step backward!