ADATA LEGEND 840

A perfectly sound drive but it has tough competition this month, and it’s also difficult to find.

★★★☆☆ 1TB, $150 | adata.com

Designed for both PC and PS5 use, the Adata Legend 840 has some stiff competition. We’ve reviewed the 1TB model, although it’s also available as a 512GB drive.

All drives ship with a heatsink as standard, which the company says keeps the drive 15 percent cooler. The competition at this price tends to ship with heatsinks, too, so it’s not particularly an Adata advantage.

As is required for a drive that supports the PS5, the Adata Legend 840 has a PCI-E Gen4 interface. Here, the specs are just right for the PS5: a claimed read speed of 5,000MB/sec and a write speed of 4,500MB/sec. Both are good in their own right, but the issue here is mostly availability.

Not as widely available as its competitors, the cheapest we could find the Adata Legend 840 was $150 on Amazon. That’s reasonable compared to than rivals, but all of the others have higher quoted read and write speeds.

Turning to the benchmarks, the Adata Legend 840 didn’t perform as well as the main competition, either. In the PCMark 10 benchmarks, scores of 2,949 in the System Disk test and 3,699 in the Data Disk test are just below mid-table.

Similarly, moving to the AS SSD test the drive is mid-table for sequential performance: 4,423MB/sec in the read test and 4,649MB/sec in the write test. Things pick up in the random test, with the drive’s controller and SLC cache helping it achieve 2,474MB/sec read speeds and 2,487MB/sec write speeds. These are good results in their own right, but the competition is faster.

Endurance is good, with the drive rated at 650TBW, which is slightly above the industry average. However, the improvement isn’t so good that this drive’s higher price can be forgiven. In fact, the Seagate FireCuda 530 offers almost double the endurance, making it a better drive for gaming.

There’s nothing wrong with the Adata Legend 840 – it’s quite fast overall – but it’s just too expensive and a bit hard to find. The WD Black SN850 or Seagate FireCuda 530 are better choices.

"There’s nothing wrong with the Adata Legend 840 – it’s quite fast overall – but it’s just too expensive and hard to find."