ADATA Legend 970 2TB SSD Review

The PCMark 10 Full System Drive Benchmark uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and common tasks to fully test the performance of the fastest modern drives. The benchmark is designed to measure the performance of fast system drives using the SATA bus at the low end and devices connected via PCI Express at the high end.

The goal of the benchmark is to show meaningful real-world performance differences between fast storage technologies such as SATA, NVMe, and Intel’s Optane. The Full System Drive Benchmark uses 23 traces, running 3 passes with each trace. It typically takes an hour to run.

Traces used:

Booting Windows 10.
Adobe Acrobat – starting the application until usable.
Adobe Illustrator – starting the application until usable Adobe Premiere Pro – starting the application until usable.
Adobe Photoshop – starting the application until usable.
Battlefield V – starting the game until the main menu.
Call of Duty Black Ops 4 – starting the game until the main menu.
Overwatch – starting the game until the main menu.
Using Adobe After Effects.
Using Microsoft Excel.
Using Adobe Illustrator.
Using Adobe InDesign.
Using Microsoft PowerPoint.
Using Adobe Photoshop (heavy use).
Using Adobe Photoshop (light use).
cp1 Copying 4 ISO image files, 20 GB in total, from a secondary drive to the target drive (write test).
cp2 Making a copy of the ISO files (read-write test).
cp3 Copying the ISO to a secondary drive (read test).
cps1Copying 339 JPEG files, 2.37 GB in total, to the target drive (write test).
cps2 Making a copy of the JPEG files (read-write test).
cps3 Copying the JPEG files to another drive (read test).

The 2TB Legend 970 averaged 267MB/s for the six Adobe startup traces, the fastest being Premiere Pro at 387MB/s. With the Adobe usage traces, the drive averaged 665MB/s including the fastest test trace, the Adobe Photoshop heavy usage trace which produced a test result of 1,436MB/s.

When it came to the three gaming traces (Battlefield V, Call Of Duty Black Ops 4 and Overwatch) the drive averaged 1,007MB/s for the three with the fastest being the Battlefield V test at 1,334MB/s.

The 2TB Legend 670 averaged 3,747MB/s for the six file transfer tests, the fastest of which was the cp1 Write test at 6,947MB/s.

With an overall bandwidth figure of 739.71MB/s, the Legend 970 sits in last place in the results chart but there isn't much to choose between all the drives really as only 26MB/s separates the fastest drive from the slowest.

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