Conclusion
ADATA has come out swinging by adding the ADATA LEGEND 960 SSD to its lineup of Consumer SSD Products. This is a mighty successor to the LEGEND 850, that improves upon it in every way. In today’s review, we took a look at the new ADATA LEGEND 960 PCIe Gen4 x4 M.2 2280 Solid State Drive model number ALEG-960-1TCS.
ADATA is targeting this SSD as an upgrade for creators, with a creator focus, but rest assured, our benchmarks and results fully prove that this SSD is geared for gaming also. It will accelerate any type of PC or laptop, or even a PS5, with PCIe Gen4 x4 NVMe SSD performance. Coming in either a 1TB or 2TB offering, this SSD has SLC Caching and a DRAM buffer for optimal performance.
Performance
Starting in PCMark 10 full system drive benchmark the ADATA LEGEND 960 1TB SSD came out on top, topping our charts in performance. At a score of 3250 it outperformed the previous champ, the Acer Predator GM7000 2TB SSD. Part of that reason was the incredible latency efficiency of the ADATA LEGEND 960 SSD at 51 microseconds, beating out every other SSD for the best average access time. In the lighter workloads of the quick benchmark for PCMark 10’s storage test, the ADATA LEGEND 960 1TB SSD came in second, right under the Acer Predator GM7000 SSD. Moving on to PassMark’s PerformanceTEST disk mark the ADATA LEGEND 960 1TB SSD was middle of the pack in performance, thanks to its excellent read and write performance overall.
In the CrystalDiskMark testing, the ADATA LEGEND 960 1TB SSD actually performed above its rated read and write speeds, especially on the write speeds. It was at the top of the charts in read performance at 7,453MB/s and even outperformed its rated sequential write speed of 6,000MB/s by performing at over 6,600MB/s in both sequential write tests. Even in the random Q32T16 performance testing its read performance was very good, competing well against the Acer Predator GM7000. Its only weakness seemed to be random Q1T1 testing, where it had decent read speeds, but the lowest write performance out of all the drives.
In the DiskCopy testing, the ADATA LEGEND 960 1TB SSD performed at the lowest, but it wasn’t far off from the Patriot Viper VPR400. The ADATA LEGEND 960 SSD redeemed itself in all other tests though, providing very fast scene loading in the Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker Benchmark. It was competitive with the top performers here. It was also a top performer in SPECworkstation 3.1, second to only the Acer Predator GM7000. ADATA said this SSD was a creator-focused SSD, and the SPECworkstation 3.1 results prove this result true with very high performance for workstation and creative applications, it certainly will not disappoint there. Finally, in ATTO we once again proved that this SSD can perform about its rated performance in sequential reads and writes.
Cooling
Among the SSDs that utilize the flat metal type of heat spreaders, the ADATA LEGEND 960 1TB SSD is among the best cooled here. The Acer Predator GM7000, for example, utilizes a custom graphene-laced foam pad, and it performed the worse at 82c. The Sabrent Rocket didn’t use a heatsink at all, and is of an older slower type of controller, and was also warmer at 79c. The ADATA LEGEND 960 uses a thicker, heavier piece of solid metal for its heat spreader, and it does a much better job keeping this fast SSD cool topping out at 73c during our intense stress test. These are much better temps compared to the Acer Predator GM7000’s heat spreader, and both SSDs were competitive in performance.
The other SSDs above the ADATA LEGEND 960 on this graph utilizes thick finned heatsinks, and naturally cool even better. So among the flat thin-profile heat spreaders, the ADATA LEGEND 960 is among the best here for keeping temps at a reasonable level.
Final Points
We said it at the top of this conclusion, the ADATA LEGEND 960 SSD is a great new entry into ADATA’s consumer SSD lineup. It improves upon the previous generation SSD from ADATA in both performance and endurance on the top end. Our benchmarks have shown that the ADATA LEGEND 960 1TB SSD can perform at or above its rated sequential speed on read and writes. We were especially impressed with the sequential write performance outperforming the rated 6,000MB/s speed for the 1TB model. It was also strong in random reads and writes with specific queue depths and threads, competing with the next fastest SSD in our lineup, the Acer Predator GM7000. The only weak spot does seem to be random write performance at a specific queue depth.
Otherwise, it does seem to do very strongly in workstation and creative performance as indicative by SPECworkstation 3.1, proving ADATA’s claims for this being a creatively focused SSD. In addition, it performed very strongly in-game scene loading times. Do not overlook this SSD for your gaming build either, it has all the right performance in the right places for a killer enthusiast gaming PC. It seems to be an overall all-arounder, well-prepared for enthusiast workloads, and competes very well with the Acer Predator GM7000. At a price of $129.99 for the 1TB model, $259.99 for the 2TB model, and a 5-year warranty, you should definitely give this SSD a look.
