Introduction

ADATA is Taiwan's largest manufacturer of flash storage and DRAM memory for computers. They have been at the forefront of SSD development for many years, bringing us famous SSDs such as the SX8200, SX900, and Gammix S70.



Today we have for review the ADATA Legend 960 in the 1 TB version. Internally the Legend 960 uses the Silicon Motion SM2264 controller—a first in TPU SSD reviews. It has been fairly quiet around Silicon Motion in the last few years, and they've lost most of their market share to Phison controllers, it seems they are making a new push for PCI-Express 4.0 SSDs for consumers now. The NAND flash used on the Legend 960 is 176-layer Micron B47R TLC, same as on many other high-end drives. A DRAM cache chip is included too, from Samsung. The Legend 960 comes without a heatsink preinstalled, but a heatspreader is included in the package. If you need better cooling, just attach the heatsink using the preapplied tape.

The ADATA Legend 960 comes in capacities of 1 TB ($110), 2 TB ($210) and 4 TB (unknown). Endurance for these models is set to 780 TBW, 1560 TBW, and 3120 TBW, respectively. ADATA includes a five-year warranty with the Legend 960 SSD.

Packaging

The Drive

The drive uses the M.2 2280 form factor, making it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


While most other M.2 NVMe SSDs transfer data over the PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface, the ADATA Legend 960 connects to the host system using PCI-Express 4.0 x4, doubling the theoretical bandwidth.


On the PCB you'll find the controller and four flash chips, two DRAM cache chips are included, too.


As mentioned before, the heatsink isn't preinstalled, which makes it easy to fit the drive into a notebook or onto a motherboard with its own cooling solution. Installing the heatsink is super easy, just peel off the paper and stick it on.

Chip Component Analysis

The Silicon Motion SM2264F is a relatively new controller design, with support for PCI-Express 4.0. It's built using a 12 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. The controller is a high-end design with eight flash channels and support for NVMe 1.4.


The four flash chips are Micron 176-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 256 GB.


Two Samsung DDR4-2400 DRAM chips provide 1 GB of fast DRAM storage for the mapping tables of the SSD.

Test Setup