It has been quite a while since we’ve taken a look at an ADATA NVMe solid state drive, we have to go all the way back to 2022 when we took a look at the XPG ATOM 50! If you didn’t know ADATA is the largest manufacturer of flash storage and DRAM in Taiwan. Today we will be taking a look at a PCI-Express 5.0 or Gen5 drive from them. This drive is the XPG Mars 980 Blade which makes use of the Silicon Motion SM2508 controller paired with Micron’s 232-layer 3D TLC NAND and a 2GB LPDDR4 DRAM cache. The drive is rated for sequential reads up to 14,000 MB/s and sequential reads up to 13,000 MB/s, making it ideal for a brand new build. Let’s take a look and see what this drive is all about!
Special thanks to ADATA for providing us with the XPG Mars 980 Blade Gen5 Solid State Drive to review.
Specifications of the ADATA XPG Mars 980 Blade Gen5 Solid State Drive
Packaging of the ADATA XPG Mars 980 Blade Gen5 Solid State Drive
The Mars 980 Blade comes in a pretty standard retail package with a picture of the drive on the front. It does let us know we have the 2TB capacity and some of the main features are listed in the top corner. Flipping over to the back there is not a whole lot of information, but there is a QR code.
Getting everything out of the box you’ll find the drive itself and a heatspreader. The heatspreader is thick and made of metal. This heatspreader is made to be used if were installing the drive is something like a PlayStation or other device where a larger M.2 heatsink isn’t present.
