Adata Legend 850 SSD evaluate: Legendary everyday performance

Best Prices Today: Adata Legend 850 512GB SSD

I used to be a bit stunned when Adata despatched the 512GB capability of its newest Legend 850 NVMe 1.4, M.2 SSD. Larger-capacity drives (1TB, 2TB, and better) typically obtain higher performance numbers due to the larger quantity of NAND out there to be used as secondary cache.

This is what I used to be considering when the 512GB Legend 850 lagged on the primary two assessments. But then, startlingly, the drive managed a 4th-place end within the 48GB file transfers amongst all of the drives we’ve examined, most of that are 1TB and 2TB contenders. This is the take a look at that the majority mimics real-world use. Color us impressed.

Note: See our roundup of the very best SSDs to study competing merchandise, what to search for in an SSD, and shopping for suggestions.

Adata Legend 850: Design and specs

Adata despatched us a restricted version Legend 850 styled by German Designer Mister Fred (not Ed.). The colourful floral motif is evocative, although not significantly indicative of digital storage. If it’s to not your style, there’s a extra mainstream charcoal-gray and gold coloration scheme, as proven beneath.

The 512GB capability of the Legend 850 we examined prices solely $48, however there are additionally 1TB and 2TB variations out there for $90 and $216, respectively. That’s an excellent worth for the 1TB, with the 2TB about par for this class of drive.

The Legend 850 is a 2280 (22x80mm) type issue, M.2, PCIe 4.0 SSD that makes use of a DRAM-less HBM (host bus reminiscence) design. In different phrases, it makes use of a few of your system reminiscence for major caching duties.

Employing an SM2269XT Silicon Motion controller, it was additionally very sensible about allocating NAND for secondary caching functions (written as 1-bit SLC slightly than the 176-layer, 3-bit TLC that’s the native capability of the cells).

The Legend 850 is warrantied for 5 years, or 500TBW (terabytes written) per 512GB of capability—whichever comes first. That’s a slightly beneficiant TBW score for the worth.

Adata Legend 850: Performance

As famous up prime, the Legend 850’s artificial benchmark numbers have been combined, with excellent learn scores and off-the-pace write scores.

However, the drive actually got here alive in studying and writing our 48GB single file and information set, besting many drives with 1TB/2TB of NAND. That’s no imply feat and sure because of the new Silicon Motion controller’s deft dealing with of secondary cache.

The Legend 850 got here again all the way down to earth in our 450GB write after an excellent begin.

There’s simply no getting round the truth that it solely had 62GB of NAND to spare on this specific take a look at. You can see within the display screen seize beneath that performance dropped fairly a bit after the 100GB mark and once more at round 350GB.

However, it dropped solely to round 450MBps, which whereas not NVMe-like, just isn’t the slothful onerous drive tempo we’ve seen from some SSDs writing off cache.

Note additionally that the Legend 850 formatted and optimized in a short time. Some bargain-level drives will take a comparative lifetime to carry out these operations.

Internal drive assessments at present make the most of Windows 11 64-bit working on an MSI MEG X570/AMD Ryzen 3700X combo with 4 16GB Kingston 2666MHz DDR4 modules, a Zotac (Nvidia) GT 710 1GB x2 PCIe graphics card, and an ASMedia ASM3242 USB 3.2×2 card. Copy assessments make the most of an ImDisk RAM disk utilizing 58GB of the 64GB complete reminiscence.

Each take a look at is carried out on a newly formatted and TRIM’d drive so the outcomes are optimum. Over time, as a drive fills up, performance will lower attributable to much less NAND for caching and different components.

The performance numbers proven apply solely to the drive we have been shipped and of the capability examined. SSD performance can differ by capability attributable to extra or fewer chips to shotgun reads/writes throughout and the quantity of NAND out there for secondary caching.Vendors additionally sometimes swap parts, and Adata didn’t exempt this drive from the observe. If you ever discover a big discrepancy between the performance you expertise, and that which we report (techniques being roughly equal), please tell us.

Should you purchase the Adata Legend 850?

Okay, you’re not prone to need a 512GB Legend 850 in your essential SSD in a quick gaming or inventive PC. But for the typical cut price PC or laptop computer it’s very good basis or improve.

Best Prices Today: Adata Legend 850 512GB SSD