Packaging

The Drive

The drive uses the M.2 2280 form factor, making it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


While most other M.2 NVMe SSDs transfer data over the PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface, the ADATA Legend 960 connects to the host system using PCI-Express 4.0 x4, doubling the theoretical bandwidth.


On the PCB you'll find the controller and four flash chips, two DRAM cache chips are included, too.


As mentioned before, the heatsink isn't preinstalled, which makes it easy to fit the drive into a notebook or onto a motherboard with its own cooling solution. Installing the heatsink is super easy, just peel off the paper and stick it on.

Chip Component Analysis

The Silicon Motion SM2264F is a relatively new controller design, with support for PCI-Express 4.0. It's built using a 12 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. The controller is a high-end design with eight flash channels and support for NVMe 1.4.


The four flash chips are Micron 176-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 256 GB.


Two Samsung DDR4-2400 DRAM chips provide 1 GB of fast DRAM storage for the mapping tables of the SSD.