The ADATA Legend 860 is positioned as a mid-range PCIe Gen4x4 NVMe solution. It promises high-speed experience without the flagship price tag, making it an excellent choice for gamers, console expanders, and general PC enthusiasts. Let’s find out how does it perform.
Starting with the packaging – a black squarish box with holographic-gilded product presentation.
Since earlier this year, ADATA has moved on to folded-paper insert to protect the SSD during transport, no more plastic trays. What’s left is a small plastic sheath. Perhaps sooner or later that will be gone as well.
The heatspreader is not pre-installed. This allows users to decide what heatsink to use with the SSD. If you have those high-end motherboards with beefy heatsink, you would definitely use those.
The Silicon Motion SM2268XT2 is capable of meeting the demands of the modern high-speed computing. The Legend 860 being a DRAM-less drive at least still support the host system DRAM for mapping the FTL table. At least that’s how general consumer is able to afford SSD with high burst speed.
As for the NAND chip, this particular unit comes with 2 units of 500GB QLC NAND.
This is how it looks like once you attached the default heat spreader.
Blazing Sequential Speed
The key selling point of the LEGEND 860 is its peak performance figures without breaking the bank: sequential read/write speeds, based on our tests, are rated up to an impressive 6,000MB/s (for our 1TB model). In real-world use, this translates to lightning-fast boot times, near-instantaneous game loading, and rapid transfer of large files. For those upgrading from an older PCIe 3.0 or SATA SSD, the boost is profound, immediately making the entire system feel snappier.
Of course, you can’t expect it to still perform if you decide to bombard it with prolonged heavy load. Once the dynamic SLC cache is exchausted during a massive, sustained write (e.g., copying hundreds of gigabytes files at once), the speed would drop significantly.
Verdict
The LEGEND 860’s M.2 2280 form factor and PCIe 4.0 interface make it compatible with the latest PC platforms, and crucially, it is also a perfect fit for PlayStation 5 storage expansion. Its performance meets the console’s requirements, offering an easy way to expand your game library without compromising load times.
| 500GB | 1TB | 2TB | |
| ADATA Legend 860 | RM460 | RM880 | RM1500 |
Overall, the ADATA LEGEND 860 is an audacious performer that punches above its weight in the mid-range category. It successfully brings high-end Gen4 sequential speeds to a wider audience. If your primary use is gaming and general desktop work, and you rarely engage in continuous, multi-hour file transfers, the LEGEND 860 offers outstanding value for speed. It’s a smart, affordable gateway to the PCIe storage without having the need to overspend for PCIe 5.0 SSD.
