ADATA Legend 960 MAX PCIe Gen4 M.2 1TB Review

A Closer Look

The drive looks stunning, and with an all-black PCB and some very neatly laid out hardware making everything very easy for me to read here. The controller is clearly visible in the middle, and it’s the SMI SM2264 from Silicon Motion, which features a quad-core ARM R8 CPU with four lanes of 16Gb/s PCIe data flow; more than enough to give this drive some swift performance.

As for the storage, the drive uses Micron B47R 176-layer 3D triple-level chips, which are rebranded with an ADATA logo as they likely made some small changes in their design, but I can’t be sure. Either way, we know these to be decent chips, and they are around 256GB a piece, which is why this drive has four of them.

Here you’ll find a Samsung DDR4-2400 512MB memory chip (K4A4G165WE-BCRC), and there’s one more on the reverse, giving the 1TB model 1GB of RAM in total, but that can vary on drives of a different capacity. Overall, a well-made drive with some very good components, so it’s no surprise this drive promises to hit some pretty swift read-and-write performance figures.

As for the heatsink, it is made from aluminium and features a textured black coating on the top with a nice ADATA logo on the top. It’s a low-profile design heatsink, so you can still use this when installing it in a PS5.

As you can see, it features some channels and fins providing more surface area throughout.

It comes with an adhesive thermal pad for easy application.

There’s also a backplate with another thermal pad for the other side, and the way it clips together ensures the heatsink maintains good contact with the SSD without the need for additional screws or tools.

With the whole thing assembled, we’re ready to rock, so let’s get testing.