Adata has introduced its first PCIe 5.0 SSD, the Legend 970. A Phison E26-based design, the Legend 970 pairs Phison's high-end controller with a sophisticated active cooling system that promises predictable performance even under high loads. The Legend 970 SSD is aimed at high-performance desktops that can take advantage of fast storage devices.

Adata's Legend 970 drives come in 1 TB and 2 TB capacities and are rated for an up to 10,000 MB/s sequential read/write speed as well as a 1.4 million random read/write IOPS, performance levels in line with those of many current-generation enterprise-grade SSDs. The drives fully support all modern SSD technologies that one comes to expect from a contemporary drive, including SLC cache, Low Density Parity Check Code (LDPC) error correction, and AES 256-bit high-level encryption.

Like other PCIe Gen 5 SSDs available now, the Legend 970 product uses Phison's PS5026-E26 controller. As for memory, the drives use Micron's 232-layer TLC NAND with a 1600 MT/s interface.

One of the key selling points of Adata's Legend 970 is its cooling system, which although a bit on the bulky side of matters, is designed to be robust enough to keep the drive from thermal throttling even under high, sustained loads. Though at 80.6×24.2×17.9mm in size, the resulting SSD is decided a desktop part – and even then the drive will need a fair bit of clearance to fit.

Adata's iniital Legend 970 SSD will eventually be joined by at least one other PCIe 5.0 SSD as well. The company's XPG division is working on their NeonStorm SSD, which uses a self-contained liquid cooling system, and is rated for read speeds of up to 14GB/second (thanks to TLC NAND with a 2400 MT/s interface).

Adata's Legend 970 drives will come with a five-year global warranty. The company hasn't published any pricing information, though we'd expect the drives to be more or less in line with other first-generation PCIe Gen5 SSDs.

Source: Adata

Comments Locked

26 Comments

View All Comments

  • meacupla - Thursday, July 6, 2023 - link

    is that a weenie little fan I see in there?
  • Soulkeeper - Friday, July 7, 2023 - link

    Yes, it'll probably clog up and fail with 1 month of use.
    At best it'll whine/squeel for several months before it stops spinning.
  • Tunnah - Friday, July 7, 2023 - link

    There's tons of those size fans in loads of places, what sort of POS would break within a month ? Nobody would buy them. That is absolute nonsense.
  • Flunk - Friday, July 7, 2023 - link

    Putting a tiny fan on a SSD is like a mule with a spinning wheel. No one knows how he got it and danged if he knows how to use it!
  • ballsystemlord - Friday, July 7, 2023 - link

    You all seem to have forgotten AMDs Motherboards chipsets' fan. These fans are by no means unreliable. They're just unusual in PC hardware in recent years.
    Back when CPUs (with floating point no less!) were young, it was fans like this that cooled them.
  • Soulkeeper - Saturday, July 8, 2023 - link

    Yeah, back then the chipset fans were a big complaint from users on forums like anandtech. They'd get pet hair/dust in them. Or they'd make high pitched noises. It seems like they always used the cheapest little fans they could slap on products also.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, July 11, 2023 - link

    Why is it even there? At worst, the controller might pull 10w? MAYBE 12? A passive sink can easily handle that.
  • PeachNCream - Saturday, July 8, 2023 - link

    I've used a wide variety of little fans over the years and most of them have a distressingly short lifespan. If I were to lay down money and time to purchase hardware and then further reply upon it to perform a function, I would not opt for something with a fan when other hardware exists that needs no moving parts to stay cool. Furthermore, one of the key points of SSDs was to eliminate motors that could fail which were crucial to storage operation. Sticking a fan on a storage device runs against that idea. And yes, its just as stupid as putting a tiny fan on an AMD chipset.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, July 11, 2023 - link

    Yes, those fans are everywhere. Which is why most people hate them, they've dealt with them!
  • meacupla - Friday, July 7, 2023 - link

    If you are clogging this low impedance heatsink up in 1 month, you should install a shop dust filter.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now