You’ll still have to look for PCIe 5.0 SSDs for consumers who don’t have a Phison controller with a magnifying glass. Adata is now releasing an M.2 SSD with Innogrit’s own IG5666 controller. The Legend 970 Pro is said to achieve 14GB/s read speeds and is actively cooled.
To the editors' knowledge, the Adata Legend 970 Pro is only the second SSD to feature the IG5666 controller. Team Group first used this chip with the T-Force GE PRO. The IG5666 is the first available replacement for Phison's E26 controller, which is found in almost all consumer PCIe 5.0 SSDs.
There are likely to be other alternatives later in the second half of the year: SK Hynix's Alistar ACNT093 and Silicon Motion's SM2508. Realtek's PCIe 5.0 SSD controllers aren't expected until 2025.
Adata Legend 970 Pro in detail
Below the 18mm-high cooler and the already familiar small fan from the Legend 970 are the 232-layer TLC memory chips (Micron or YMTC?) and DRAM cache along with the IG5666 controller. According to the datasheet (PDF), the maximum performance of 14GB/s read and 11GB/s write as well as 1.8/1.3 million IOPS is only achieved by the 4TB model, which is also specified at 2,960TBW. The 2TB version should have 14GB/s read and 10GB/s write as well as the same IOPS at 1,480TBW, while the smaller 1TB and 740TBW version is noticeably slower: it still has 13GB/s read, but the maximum available write is only 5.8GB/s. IOPS drops to 1.7/1.25 million.
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Legend 970 Pro SSD (Image: Adata)
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The Legend 970 Pro supports NVMe 2.0 and AES-256 encryption. SLC cache to speed up writes is a must these days.
What Adata hasn't sent out yet is information about pricing and availability levels.
