ADATA Legend 850 Lite Review: The Faster it is, the Hotter it Gets

The SSD Market has been getting better – especially for users who now want to opt in for the newer Gen M.2 SSD. That said, over the past few weeks, we have been testing the ADATA Legend 850 Lite 1TB – because at sub-RM 300 – it does seem to have a nice value proposition as a PCIe Gen 4 SSD. But you’d want to read the entire review before hitting the buy and checkout button.

ADATA Legend 850 Lite Review

The SSD

The ADATA Legend 850 Lite comes in a simple package and as you remove it from the box, you are greeted with the SSD and an ultra-thin heat sink (more like a sticker sheet) which you can paste on top of the SSD. But do take note that once you do paste it, it is not easy to remove. Immediately, when you look at the SSD, you can tell that it falls in the affordable category for many reasons.

We received the 1TB variant, and we can see that there are 2x NAND chips and more specifically, these are 3D NAND (also known as vertical NAND) which offers lower cost per bit, lower power consumption and better endurance.

Other than that, closer to the Key, we see the SM2269XTM controller from Silicon Motion. We don’t see any DRAM as this is a DRAM-less SSD. DRAM is crucial for caching reasons. But if you scroll through ADATA’s site, they claim to offer SLC Caching and Host Memory Buffer. It’s heavily dependent on the device’s memory you choose to use this SSD on. On the back, there’s the label, which is pretty much it.

Specification and Performance

This SSD we have here comes configured as a 1TB SSD – however, should you require a smaller capacity or bigger, ADATA does offer those (500GB or 2TB). It relies on the PCIe Gen 4×4 interface – so just by that you’d know that this performs faster than a Gen 3 rated at 3000MB/s. So, we benchmarked the ADATA Legend 850 Lite with ATTO Benchmark, CrystalDiskMark and CrystalDiskInfo.

Disclaimer: We did not receive a brand-new SSD from ADATA, and there is minimal use recorded on it – which we used CrystalDiskInfo to verify.

Let’s start with PCIe Gen 3×4 tests to see if it perfectly hits the speeds and you can see that it hits the SEQ1M Reads at 3198MB/s and 2831MB/s in Write speeds. It’s pretty much on par with a PCIe Gen 3×4 SSD. During this benchmark, we noticed how the SSD’s idle temperature was around 34 degrees Celsius and during the benchmark, it peaked at 50 degrees Celsius.

Switching over to the PCIe Gen 4×4 Slot, we noticed a completely different experience. For one, the speeds were fantastic, hitting the 5154MB/s read and 4661MB/s write speeds. Now, ADATA mentioned that this SSD hits sequential read speeds of up to 5000MB/s and writes up to 4200MB/s. In our case, it did surpass by a little. But this is where we noticed the thermals going a little higher than usual. The SSD peaked at 70 degrees Celsius – making it pretty hot when it’s performing.

We then proceeded to test the SSD with ATTO Benchmark, to see when it hit the 70-degree mark. The idle temperature before we started the benchmark was 37 degrees Celsius. At the 256KB mark, it went up to 47 degrees Celsius. Right after the end of 8MB, we saw a spike to 61 degrees and throughout the benchmark till 64MB, we noticed that it hovered in the 63–67-degree mark. This is without a doubt a pretty hot SSD and the included heat sink sticker offers no improvement in thermal dissipation.

So, you’d have to either look for a better thermal pad and enclosure for better dissipation or if your motherboard has a built-in thermal pad enclosure like our motherboard does, then it would benefit to a certain extent.

How about PS5 Performance?

We did try the ADATA Legend 850 Lite on the PS5 and it hit 4813MB/s read speeds, which puts the SSD in the exact speed range as they claimed. But the writing speed is questionable. There isn’t any way to measure it, however, it took about a good 15 minutes to move, 3 games with a total size of 185GB. At this point, this just might be the affordable alternative to the PCIe Gen 5 SSDs out there and you can still run games off of the second storage.

But again, this does not come with a heatsink.

Conclusion

The thing is, for the price that you are paying – the ADATA Legend 850 Lite is a value buy from a performance standpoint – as it sure is one, as it’s a PCIe Gen 4 SSD and extremely affordable.

However, one of the biggest challenges would be the thermals as the included thermal “dissipator” offers little to no improvements and we realized either getting a better thermal pad and enclosure would make things better or if you are using this on a mid/high-end motherboard – chances are it already includes one. As much as ADATA claims that it works with PS5, I’d say get a PCIe Gen 5 SSD with a heatsink to take advantage of the expandable slot – unless you are desperate and want a storage that doesn’t break the bank.

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