Performance
The performance has been tested on the AMD Ryzen platform that contains the Ryzen 5 7600, 6-core processor, ASRock B650E PG-ITX motherboard, ADATA Lancer 32GB DDR5-7200 memory kit, and Acer Predator GM7000 2TB M.2 SSD with installed Win11 Pro x64 as an OS drive. All tests were performed on the ADATA Legend 970 2TB SSD.
Let’s begin as usual with the ATTO Disk Benchmark.
The Legend 970 wasn’t far from the declared 10GB/s in the ATTO Benchmark. We could reach 9.41GB/s read, and 9.53GB/s write bandwidth. A slightly higher write bandwidth will appear in all other benchmarks. It suggests that maybe with improved firmware, we will be able to see a higher linear read bandwidth.
CrystalDiskMark, as usual, shows us what we were expecting, so the bandwidth is around the declared values or even higher. We have reached 10083MB/s read and 10196MB/s linear write bandwidth.
IOPS are also slightly higher than declared. 1440k IOPS is impressive. As usual, we wish to see a higher RND4K Q1T1 bandwidth, as it has not improved for years, and most M.2 SSDs have between 70-90MB/s read. Slightly better results in low queue random operations are on Intel chipsets, but not more than 5-8MB/s.
In PCMark 10, the results are fantastic. This test is one of the most important as it shows daily usage and mixed workload performance.
All results are amazing, putting the Legend 970 SSD almost on the top of results in our redaction!
The 3DMark Storage Benchmark score confirms the exceptional performance of the Legend 970. Only two SSDs have passed the 4k mark in our tests so far.
Anvil’s Storage Utilities is a rather old benchmark but is still popular. This benchmark usually shows lower results than the ATTO or the CrystalDiskMark. It doesn’t change the fact that the results are pretty high.
In the AIDA64 Disk Benchmark, we focus on random read and write operations.
Both tests show high bandwidth, but the write bandwidth is significantly higher – up to 3.8GB/s. Both AIDA64 tests are very demanding and stress the SSD. Usually, these tests show throttling when the cooling has any problems. As you can see, the results were quite stable during both tests, and there was no thermal throttling at all. The screenshot from hwinfo64 on the second page of the review was made after these tests, and the maximum temperature was 67°C.
The Legend 970 is definitely one of the fastest SSDs on the market. If we have a motherboard that supports M.2 PCIe 5.0 x4 SSD, it will give us great results in games or more professional usage. It’s still an expensive option, but avid gamers spend much more on motherboards or graphics cards, while fast storage is not less important.
