Page 10 - Conclusion
The Legend 960 1TB is a new flagship drive that features Silicon Motion's new SM2264 controller sold under the ADATA brand to be aimed at creative professionals rather than the XPG label. Given the name and branding, is this a true flagship drive, or is there something we were missing? I honestly do not think we are missing anything, as the Legend 960 is no doubt a true flagship drive. Its specifications of 7400MB/s read, 6000MB/s write, up to 730,000 IOPS read, and up to 610,000 IOPS write over NVMe 1.4 on PCIe 4.0 x4 are impressive, and this is reflected in our benchmark results with its very fast synthetic linear read and write results, solid small file throughput, and even some random data tests. The ADATA Legend 960 1TB is also highly optimized for general consumer day-to-day workloads as demonstrated by its top-tier PCMark 10 and 3DMark numbers. The Micron B47R 176-layer 3D TLC memory has a great write endurance rating of 780TBW. I also like the included heatsink that is not installed from the factory, which you can easily install yourself, but choose not to have it on if you have something better. The PlayStation 5 compatibility is the icing on the cake. There are some areas of improvement as far as performance is concerned though, and this primarily relates to randomized workloads with high IOPS requirements like our PassMark Performance 10 Advanced Disk Test. It is still in the ballpark of other drives in its class, but it is not nearly as fast as the Kingston FURY Renegade 1TB. For an MSRP of $130 at press time, you are sure to find the ADATA Legend 960 1TB at a lower price at your favorite retailer later on, which makes it quite reasonable. The aforementioned FURY Renegade 1TB can be had for $110, while the WD_BLACK SN850X 1TB -- an optimized version of the excellent WD_BLACK SN850 1TB -- sells for $130 at press time. As expected, the ADATA Legend 960 1TB comes with a 5-year warranty, and if you are looking for a very fast drive optimized for day-to-day use, it is definitely worth a look.
ADATA provided this product to APH Networks for the purpose of evaluation.
APH:Renewal Award
Since April 30, 2007, Number Ratings have been dropped for all CPUs, motherboards, RAM, SSD/HDDs, and graphics cards. This is to ensure the most appropriate ratings are reflected without the inherent limits of using numbers. Everything else will continue using the Number Rating System.
More information in our Review Focus.
The ADATA Legend 960 1TB is a high performance PCIe 4.0-based NVMe SSD that delivers class-leading results for day-to-day use.
Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. A Closer Look, Test System
3. Benchmark: AIDA64 Disk Benchmark
4. Benchmark: ATTO Disk Benchmark
5. Benchmark: Crystal Disk Mark 8.0
6. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 5.70
7. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 10
8. Benchmark: PCMark 10
9. Benchmark: 3DMark
10. Conclusion
