ADATA Legend 850 Lightning Review: Aggressively Priced NVMe Gen4 SSD

It goes without saying that ADATA is a brand with a reputation for producing decent memory and storage solutions, all at a relatively affordable price-to-performance ratio. Recently, the Taiwan-based company sent us over its Legend 850 PCIe Gen4 SSD, asking if we would be interested in testing it. Naturally, I said yes.

What Is It?

On a totem pole of speed and value for NVMe SSDs, The Legend 850 can be found somewhere within the middle, mingling amongst other slightly higher-end NVMe Gen4 SSDs, such as the WD Black SN770 and SN850X, as well as Gigabyte AORUS Gen4 SSDs. This is because, at the time of writing, these are just a handful of PCIe Gen4 SSDs still available on the market that have average sequential read and write speeds of 5000MB/s, across the board.

Is It Any Good?

Specs-wise, the Legend 850 that I have in the lab is the 1TB capacity option but from the looks of it, ADATA is also making a 512GB variant available in Malaysia. Additional specifications include an SM2269XT controller made by Silicon Motion, along with a 3D NAND Flash built into it.

The packaging for the Legend 850 is as simple as M.2 SSD packages go. You get the branding on the exterior and inside, the SSD, and a thin heatsink that ADATA sets aside, leaving it to the discretion of the consumer, whether or not they wish to attach it.

Again, its average sequential read and write speeds of 5000MB/s are fast, but for a standard that came out four years ago, it is safe to say that PCIe Gen4 speeds have vastly improved since then, with other memory brands able to offer SSDs with speeds upwards of 7000MB/s.

The Bad Stuff. Tell Me.

As far as flaws go, there isn’t a great deal that would have me deter you from purchasing ADATA’s Legend 850 SSD, save for maybe the price. With an SRP of RM580 for the 1TB variant, this NVMe 4.0 SSD is priced aggressively against WD’s Black SN770 of the same capacity, which retails for RM499, while the Black SN850X 1TB cost about the same, but offers significantly faster read and write speeds. For that matter, Gigabyte’s own 1TB AORUS Gen4 SSD is also retailing at that same price point.

Also, the adhesive on the heatsink looks like a one-off pasting, meaning that once it’s stuck on the SSD, it is unlikely that you’ll be able to remove it easily. You have been warned.

Should I Buy It?

Once again, given how aggressively ADATA is pricing its Legend 850 NVMe Gen4 SSD, there is little for me to tell you that this M.2 SSD isn’t a viable purchase. That being said, for as long as I can remember, this brand has always made some solid quality products with a reasonable price-to-performance ratio and value, and this component is no exception to the rule.

On that note, the price differences between the Legend 850 and its NVMe Gen4 competitors in the same performance range also aren’t that vastly different from each other, making it an option on the table that I most certainly and whole-heartedly can endorse, be it as a main drive or as an expansion option.

Photography by John Law.