The LEGEND 970 comes in a small black and purple box. Along with a picture of the drive, the front advertises a number of its key features including its 1TB capacity and PCIe Gen5 x3 interface. The back of the box provides a bit more information regarding the LEGEND 970's features and performance.
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Physical Features:
The LEGEND 970 uses the 2280 form factor for M.2 (NGFF) SSDs. It measures 80.6 x 24.2 x 17.9 mm and weighs in at 57.1g. The drive also has an "M key" edge connector which provides PCIe SSDs with up to 4x lanes of bandwidth.
The LEGEND 970 features ADATA’s patented active-air coiling solution. The drive is equipped with a double-layer extruded aluminum heatsink as well as a built-in micro fan that draws in cool air through the top and quickly expels heat from both sides of the aluminum fins. The LEGEND 970 also uses "surface crystallization" to increase the overall air contact area and maximize the heat dissipation efficiency of its air cooling system. According to ADATA, this unique "active heat dissipation" design significantly reduces temperatures by 10% when compared to fanless heatsinks.
The LEGEND 970's heatsink wraps entirely around the drive and is attached using four screws. While this ensures a solid fit, it also adds about 4mm to the overall width of the drive. This doesn't sound like much. However, you will want to make sure that the card doesn't hit a PCI slot or any of the other components on your motherboard. Also take note that the heat spreader is quite tall (17mm) and that it may interfere with your video card if your motherboard's M.2 slot is below it.
Like most other PCIe Gen5 SSDs, the LEGEND 970 uses Phison's PS5026-E26 controller. Manufactured using TSMC 12nm process technology, this PCIe 5.0 x4 NVMe 2.0 controller is equipped with two ARM Cortex R5 cores and has 8 NAND channels with 32 chip enables (CE) per channel. The E26 also offers support for 3D TLC/QLC NAND flash and features end-to-end data path protection, thermal throttling, SmartECC technology and Phison's fifth generation low-density parity-check (LDPC) ECC algorithm for improved drive reliability.
For the 1TB version of the LEGEND 970, ADATA has opted to use Micron's 232-layer 3D TLC NAND flash. If you'd remove the heatsink, you'd find two 256GB NAND flash packages on either side of the PCB. The drive also has a single 2GB SK Hynix DDR4 SDRAM memory chip that is used for caching.
