ADATA LEGEND 960 MAX Review – A little Underwhelming…
ADATA’s latest and greatest PCIe Gen4x4 SSD, the LEGEND 960 MAX, is meant to rival the best drives on the market. It’s priced around the same, offers up to 4TB capacities and claims 7.4GB/s reads and 6.8GB/s writes – even a 5 year warranty and PS5 compatibility – but in my testing it’s solidly midfield at best. This isn’t just another Phison E18 SSD either, this uses a Silicon Motion SW2264F controller, this 1TB model has 1GB of Samsung DDR4 RAM as a cache, and 4 packages of 256GB ADATA 3D NAND flash. It even comes with a stylish heatsink in the box! Unfortunately that heatsink doesn’t work with Asus motherboards and will be almost impossible to remove once it’s installed, but it’s there if you want it.
As for its performance, it claims 7.4GB/s on reads and 6.8GB/s on writes, but at least with my test system – a Ryzen 7900X and X670E motherboard – I can’t get it to offer more than 6.5GB/s on reads and 6.4GB/s on writes. That does put it in the same ballpark as the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus G and Solidigm P44 Pro though. The random 4KB block sizes tests aren’t quite as strong, although still better than the P44 Pro by a decent margin especially on writes. With a queue depth of one though the 960 MAX comes last – although only by a fraction of a MB/s behind the P44 Pro. To be clear this is still perfectly decent performance, but it’s not exactly chart topping.
In AS SSD you’ll find the 960 MAX at the back of the pack, only ahead of the Samsung 980 PRO which is one of the first generation Gen4x4 drives. It’s not far behind the rest, only about 100MB/s on reads and writes behind the P44 Pro, although it’s up to half a gigabyte per second slower than the top end Sabrent drive. The 4KB random block size performance is a bit of a shock here though. It’s the slowest in read performance and only beats the ageing Samsung 980 PRO by 4MB/s in writes… It’s 35MB/s slower than the next fastest drive in writes, although a lot closer in read performance. Still, this isn’t a promising result. If you up the thread count to 64 you do get better performance for sure, it’s the median performing drive in writes which is good, although it’s the second slowest in reads again only behind the 980 PRO.
Lastly for the synthetic tests we have ATTO. This is by far the strangest result for the 960 MAX. You can see that most drives have a pretty easy to see curve for performance. By the 64KB block size, maybe 128KB for faster drives, they offer their best performance. The 960 MAX though? At least on reads that peak doesn’t come until the 256KB block size, and it’s quite considerably lower than the rest of the drives I’ve tested across that range. Its write performance is unaffected, which makes the read results even more strange.
When it comes to slightly more real world tests, I like to run a file duplication test to stress the controller for both reads and writes simultaneously. This normally shows how big the SLC cache is on the drive, which for the 960 MAX is a worryingly small 30GB or so. After just 30GB of files transferred, the drive slowed from its peak performance of 2.1GB/s – which is pretty decent for a Gen4x4 drive – down to under 1GB/s. That’s still not bad, that’s about what a Gen3 drive offers at peak performance, but it’s nowhere near as good as some of the other drives I’ve tested recently. I am happy to report though that even after writing pretty much the full 1TB capacity, just using the motherboard’s heatsink, the 960 MAX only peaked at 52°c, a very good result.
All in all, the 960 MAX isn’t what I’d call a bad drive, it’s just not the best I’ve tested. It couldn’t live up to its claimed specs in my testing, nor could it quite keep up with the more recent spat of Gen4x4 drives. It’s priced reasonably well but not much cheaper than Sabrent’s offerings, and for the extra fiver I’d definitely get the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus instead. Sure, you don’t get a heatsink with the Rocket, but if you are using this in a PC (rather than a PS5 for example), you can’t use the heatsink anyway and your motherboard’s heatsink will do just fine so don’t worry about it. At another tenner less I’d consider this a good value – perhaps if they sold it without the heatsink – but as it stands I think there are better drives for the same sort of price.
