Image: Adata
At a glimpse
Professional’s Rating
Pros
- Fantastic real-world efficiency
- Extremely budget-friendly
- Appealing designer-styled heat spreader readily available.
Cons
- 512GB capability is a fairly sluggish author
Our Verdict
For $50 it’s difficult to beat the 512GB Legend 850, which in fact bested a variety of 1TB and 2TB SSDs in our real-world 48GB file transfers.
Cost When Reviewed
$59.99 for 512GB
Finest Prices Today: Adata Legend 850 512GB SSD
$47.99
$59.99
I was a bit stunned when Adata sent out the 512GB capability of its most current Legend 850 NVMe 1.4, M. 2 SSD. Larger-capacity drives (1TB, 2TB, and greater) typically accomplish much better efficiency numbers due to the fact that of the higher quantity of NAND offered for usage as secondary cache.
This is what I was believing when the 512GB Legend 850 lagged on the very first 2 tests. Then, startlingly, the drive handled a 4th-place surface in the 48GB file transfers amongst all the drives we’ve evaluated, many of which are 1TB and 2TB competitors. This is the test that the majority of mimics real-world usage. Color us impressed.
Keep in mind: See our roundup of the very best SSDs to discover contending items, what to try to find in an SSD, and purchasing suggestions.
Adata Legend 850: Design and specifications
Adata sent us a minimal edition Legend 850 styled by German Designer Mister Fred (not Ed). The vibrant flower theme is expressive, though not especially a sign of digital storage. If it’s not to your taste, there’s a more traditional charcoal-gray and gold color pattern, as revealed listed below.

The 512GB capability of the Legend 850 we checked expenses just $48, however there are likewise 1TB and 2TB variations offered for $90 and $216, respectively. That’s an excellent rate for the 1TB, with the 2TB about par for this class of drive.
The Legend 850 is a 2280 (22x80mm) type element, M. 2, PCIe 4.0 SSD that utilizes a DRAM-less HBM (host bus memory) style. To put it simply, it utilizes a few of your system memory for main caching responsibilities.
Using an SM2269XT Silicon Motion controller, it was likewise extremely clever about assigning NAND for secondary caching functions (composed as 1-bit SLC instead of the 176-layer, 3-bit TLC that’s the native capability of the cells).
The Legend 850 is warrantied for 5 years, or 500TBW (terabytes composed) per 512GB of capability– whichever comes. That’s a rather generous TBW ranking for the cost.
The 512GB Legend 850 actually came alive in reading and composing our 48GB file and information set, besting lots of drives with 1TB/2TB of NAND.
As kept in mind up leading, the Legend 850’s artificial benchmark numbers were blended, with great read ratings and off-the-pace compose ratings.

The drive actually came alive in reading and composing our 48GB single file and information set, besting lots of drives with 1TB/2TB of NAND. That’s no mean accomplishment and most likely due to the brand-new Silicon Motion controller’s deft handling of secondary cache.

The Legend 850 returned down to earth in our 450GB compose after a great start.

There’s simply no navigating the reality that it just had 62GB of NAND to spare in this specific test. You can see in the screen capture listed below that efficiency dropped a fair bit after the 100GB mark and once again at around 350GB.
It dropped just to around 450MBps, which while not NVMe-like, is not the slothful difficult drive speed we’ve seen from some SSDs composing off cache.

Keep in mind likewise that the Legend 850 formatted and enhanced extremely rapidly. Some bargain-level drives will take a relative life time to carry out these operations.
Internal drive tests presently use Windows 11 64-bit working on an MSI MEG X570/AMD Ryzen 3700X combination with 4 16GB Kingston 2666MHz DDR4 modules, a Zotac (Nvidia) GT 710 1GB x2 PCIe graphics card, and an ASMedia ASM3242 USB 3.2 × 2 card. Copy tests make use of an ImDisk RAM disk utilizing 58GB of the 64GB overall memory.
Each test is carried out on a recently formatted and TRIM ‘d drive so the outcomes are optimum. In time, as a drive fills, efficiency will reduce due to less NAND for caching and other aspects.
The efficiency numbers revealed use just to the drive we were delivered and of the capability checked. SSD efficiency can differ by capability due to more or less chips to shotgun reads/writes throughout and the quantity of NAND readily available for secondary caching. Suppliers likewise periodically switch elements, and Adata did not exempt this drive from the practice. If you ever observe a big disparity in between the efficiency you experience, which we report (systems being approximately equivalent), please let us understand.
Should you purchase the Adata Legend 850?
Okay, you’re not most likely to desire a 512GB Legend 850 for your primary SSD in a quick video gaming or innovative PC. For the typical deal PC or laptop computer it’s really great structure or upgrade.
Finest Prices Today: Adata Legend 850 512GB SSD
$47.99
$59.99
Author: Jon L. Jacobi
Freelance factor
Jon Jacobi is an artist, previous x86/6800 developer, and veteran computer system lover. He composes evaluations on TVs, SSDs, rush webcams, remote gain access to software application, Bluetooth speakers, and sundry other consumer-tech software and hardware.