ADATA Legend 970 PRO 2 TB PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD Review – 14 GB/s InnoGrit With Cable-Free Active-Fan Cooling

In early 2023, we got our first taste of the latest PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSDs, offering up to 10,000 MB/s read and write capabilities. These drives were fast but we knew that faster drives would be entering the market sooner or later as the technology matured. Furthermore, Gen5 platforms are more accessible to a wider range of audiences with the introduction of mainstream AMD & Intel motherboards.

While offering 10 GB/s speeds as a start, SSD manufacturers have quickly started rolling out faster drives by optimizing thermal designs and utilizing enhanced NAND solutions. ADATA launched its first Gen5 drives in late 2023, kicking things off with the Legend 970, a 10 GB/s drive that featured active cooling and was based on the Phison E26 controller. The drive was decent but the company was also working on various other Gen5 products that would be introduced later in its upper-high-end range. Some of these SSDs were showcased at Computex 2023 and today, we are giving you a first taste of the brand-new Legend 970 PRO SSD.

For today's review, we will be taking a look at the ADATA Legend 970 PRO 2 TB SSD which is equipped with an InnoGrit Gen5 controller and is aiming at the high-end storage segment. This SSD comes at a retail price of around $500-$550 US which puts it in the same league as other rivaling Gen5 SSDs in 4 TB capacities.

The ADATA Legend 970 PRO is part of the Legend Gen5 lineup. The MSI Legend Gen5 SSDs are based on the NVMe SSD form factor and feature the latest Micron 232-layer TLC 3D NAND flash which offers larger capacities of up to 4 TB, twice the performance of Gen4 drives, & full compliance with Microsoft's DirectStorage API. The Legend Pro series SSDs are based on the high-end InnoGrit IG5666 Gen5 controller which makes it one of the first InnoGrit Gen5 SSDs we have tested.

As for the specs, the ADATA Legend 970 Pro SSD comes with the standard NVMe 2.0 PCIe Gen 5 x4 interface in the M.2 2280 form factor. It will feature 1 TB, 2 TB, and up to 4 TB capacities with a rated speed of up to 14 GB/s (Sequential Read) and 10 GB/s (Sequential Write). The majority of Gen 5 drives available right now peak out at 12 GB/s Read and 11 GB/s Write speeds. One of the major features of this SSD is the use of a large heatsink which is said to reduce temperatures by up to 20 percent compared to a non-fan solution.

Note - The 2 TB model that we tested had a peak sequential read speed of 14,000 & a write speed of 10,000 MB/s. The Random Reads and Writes IOPS were rated at 1800K/1300K IOPS & endurance was rated at 1480 TBW.

The ADATA Legend 970 PRO 2 TB comes in a small package. The package is colored black/purple and features a large picture of the SSD on it.

The front also lists down some features such as capacity, PCIe 5.0, and its NVMe M.2 form factor. The back of the package lists some specifications of the SSD and some performance figures which we will get to in a bit.

The SSD comes pre-attached with the dual-layer aluminum alloy heatsink which incorporates the active-fan cooler.

The ADATA Legend 970 PRO SSDs are a bit non-traditional due to their active-cooling fan design but will easily fit in the M.2 slot without interfering with the GPU or motherboard heatsinks due to their compact nature.

The heatsink makes use of an aluminum alloy block which is big enough to keep the SSD cooled even when running passively. There's enough space within the heatsink for the air to pass through.

Both the front and back of the heatsink fully enclose the SSD PCB within it and the only exposed area is the M.2 slot connector.

The bottom of the heatsink is a cover with the standard labels on it. That's about it as far as the outside is concerned.

The ADATA Legend 970 PRO SSDs measure 80.6x24.2x17.9mm and weigh 52.1 grams.

The heatsink is disassembled by unscrewing four screws on the sides. One of the screws is hidden beneath the "Warranty Void" sticker. Once disassembled, you can note that both sides of the heatsink have large thermal pads underneath them that cover the entire length of the SSD from front to back.

The front of the drive has the InnoGrit "IG5666FAA" controller with two Samsung "K4A8G165WC-BCTD" DRAM modules offering 4 GB of DDR4-2666 of cache (2 modules - one on front and one on back) and four NAND Flash dies (two on front and two on back).

On the back of the SSD, you can also note another Samsung DDR4 module along with two NAND Flash modules. This makes up a total of 8 GB of LPDDR4 cache onboard the SSD.

Lastly, you can note a small connector on the other end of the PCB which is for the active fan. The SSD doesn't feature any additional cable to power up the fan which makes for a nice cable-free installation.

Our test platform for this review consisted of an Intel Core i9-13900K processor which ran at stock clocks on the MSI Z790 ACE motherboard. The platform was coupled with 32 GB of DDR5 memory from G.Skill (Trident Z5/ 16 GB x 2) and the MSI MEG Ai1300P PSU. For graphics, I used the MSI GeForce RTX 4090 SUPRIM X. This rounds up as a high-end platform for tests with modern-day SSDs. The MSI Z790 ACE specifically houses a single Gen 5.0 x4 NVMe slot that sources its lanes from the Raptor Lake CPU.

First up, we have the official performance stats for these drives as listed by their manufacturers. You can compare these stats with the rest of the drives I tested in the following chart:

AS SSD Benchmark download is a Windows 10 utility software program that tests the performance of solid-state drives. With its help, you can find out the speed of all installed SSDs and take care of any issues that the tests may reveal. The free app performs three separate tests to provide you with conclusive evidence of your driver's general behavior while it copies, reads, and writes data.  The app determines the access time of an SSD, along with its speed and performance capabilities

As the industry’s leading provider of high-performance storage & network connectivity products, ATTO has created a widely-accepted Disk Benchmark freeware software to help measure storage system performance. As one of the top tools utilized in the industry, Disk Benchmark identifies performance in hard drives, solid-state drives, RAID arrays as well as the host connection to attached storage. Top drive manufacturers, like Hitachi, build and test every drive using the ATTO Disk Benchmark.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturer's RAID controllers, storage controllers, host bus adapters (HBAs), hard drives, and SSD drives, and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

CrystalDiskMark is a disk benchmark software. It measures sequential reads/writes speed, random 512KB, 4KB, 4KB (Queue Depth=32) reads/writes speed, selects test data (Random, 0Fill, 1Fill),

To test the maximum average transfer speeds of the drives, I used a 100 GB file to test the limits.

The PCMark 10 Storage benchmark is designed to test the performance of SSDs, HDDs, and hybrid drives with traces recorded from Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office, and a selection of popular games. You can test the system drive or any other recognized storage device, including local external drives. Unlike synthetic storage tests, the PCMark 10 Storage benchmark highlights real-world performance differences between storage devices.

The whole Gen5 SSD ecosystem is relatively new and we are seeing gradual improvements coming with each new product release. So far, most companies have settled down at 12.4 GB/s which is a big improvement over what Gen4 SSDs offer and a 28% improvement over the first iteration of the Gen5 products. Pushing for high-speeds results in the Gen5 controller & NAND getting a bit toasty and that's why all manufacturers have put their engineering expertise in heatsink solutions which are some of the biggest we have seen for SSDs yet.

There are currently three Gen5 solutions you can select from. There are the standard non-heatsink SSDs that come with Graphene pads, there are the pre-installed heatsink variants and then there are heatsink solutions that you can purchase separately.

ADATA's solution for its high-performance Legend 970 PRO drives comes with a pre-installed heatsink. ADATA upgraded the original Legend design to improve the cooling potential of its existing solution while also making it cable-free, which was a nuisance to the previous Legend products. This leads to easy installation and better cooling performance which accompanied by InnoGrit's Gen5 controller make for a breezy Gen5 experience.

In terms of performance, the ADATA Legend 970 PRO is still a very high-end SSD that sits at the high end of our charts. The saw has great raw performance but the use of DDR4-2666 memory hinders its Random capabilities a bit. Then there's the other issue which is that there aren't a lot of use cases for such high-performance NVMe speeds at the moment. The technology is there but the software needs work. There have been a few cases where Gen5 SSDs are starting to showcase their prowess but besides some DirectStorage games, there isn't a whole lot.

As for pricing, ADATA hasn't shared that with us yet but we expect the 2 TB model of the Legend 970 PRO to be priced somewhere around the $300 US range which. 14 GB/s drives usually end up in the $350 US price point so something close to that will be decent in the limited 14 GB/s space & anything lower like $320-$330 will be great for those who want to experience the fastest storage solutions on the market right now.

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