The ADATA Legend 960 is based on the new Silicon Motion SM2264 controller. This review is the first SM2264-based SSD that we're reviewing here at TPU. During PCIe 3.0 days, Silicon Motion was a market leader and consistently offered high-performance SSDs that were widely used. When PCIe 4.0 was introduced, they lacked competitive designs and lost most of their market share to Phison, who have released many new and improved Gen 4 controllers over the years. With the SM2264, Silicon Motion is making a push to reclaim that lost market share.

In our synthetic testing, on an empty drive, the Legend 960 performs very well. It easily matches competing PCIe 4.0 drives with good performance in all these tests. It's very impressive to see better random IOPS than nearly all drives on the market, and the write rates are among the best, claiming the #2 spot in our test group. Clearly it looks like the SMI drive is a winner, when it comes to synthetic benchmarks.

Things look much different in our extensive real-life test suite, that runs actual applications, with the drive filled to 80%. Nobody uses a nearly empty SSD in real-life, which is why we're testing with a partially filled disk, to make things more realistic, but this also makes it harder for the controller to perform best. Here the results are disappointing. The ADATA Legend only reaches performance that's comparable to good PCIe 3.0 drives, like the ADATA SX8200 Pro, Samsung 980 and Hynix Gold P31. The fastest PCIe 4.0 drives are up to 6% faster. Compared to entry-level M.2 drives the performance uplift is 10%, and when compared against SATA SSDs, the difference is even 20-40%. It seems that SMI spent a lot of time optimizing their drive for the synthetic workloads that most reviewers run, so they look good in their benchmarks.

Thanks to a large SLC cache, the ADATA Legend 960 can easily absorb large incoming write bursts. A SLC capacity of 117 GB is "good," filling the whole drive completed at an average speed of 1.65 GB/s, which is an excellent result and comparable to what the best PCIe 4.0 SSDs offer.

ADATA ships the drive without heatsink preinstalled, which makes it easy to install it everywhere—laptop, desktop, just plop it in and you're good. If you feel you want better cooling, you can install the heatsink, which is included in the package, for free. Test results of our thermal stress test are not that impressive though. Without heatsink, the Legend 960 will throttle within 75 seconds of being fully loaded. If you add the heatsink, this time is doubled to 180 seconds, but eventually it will still throttle. Most competing drives do quite a bit better here, especially when they have a heatsink installed. Our thermal testing is a worst-case stress test though, during normal usage, with consumer workloads you'll rarely experience throttling though.

The ADATA Legend 960 1 TB currently sells for $110, which is simply too much for what the drive offers. You can find plenty of Gen 4 SSDs for well under $100 these days—both faster and cheaper than the Legend 960, at the same time. A great option right now are the various Phison E18 drives on the market. If you want even higher performance, then the Hynix P41 Platinum or Solidigm P44 Pro are what you want, they are sold for $100 and $110 respectively. If you want to maximize savings, then you should consider the MSI Spatium M450 that's currently discounted to an amazing $65. Another DRAM-less option is the Samsung 980 non-Pro, for $75. Both these drives are not much slower than the Legend 960, but MUCH more affordable. Given the results from this review, I feel like ADATA will have to bring their price down considerably. Right now there's plenty of options that are faster and cheaper, with the Legend 960 not standing out in any way.