The ADATA XPG Mars 980 Blade (starts at $129.99 list for 1TB; $199.99 for 2TB as tested) is the company's second PCI Express 5.0 internal solid-state drive (SSD). (The first was the ADATA Legend 970.) The Mars 980 provides a massive sequential read/write speed boost over its predecessor and some slight gains in random read/write performance, while coming in at a modest price for a PCIe 5.0 stick. But overall performance is lackluster, making the Editors' Choice-winning Crucial T500 (our top value-and-performance pick for internal SSDs) a better choice if you're okay with PCIe 4.0 speeds, and the WD Black SN8100 if PCIe 5.0 speed is your aim.

Design: Heat Spreader Included

The Mars 980 Blade is a four-lane solid-state drive running the NVMe 2.0 protocol over a PCIe 5.0 bus. This internal SSD comes in the standard M.2 Type-2280 "gumstick" format. The two-sided drive (with chips on both sides) uses Micron's B58R 232-layer 3D TLC NAND flash and a Silicon Motion SM2508 controller, which is designed for both high performance and energy efficiency.

The SM2508 is a relatively new controller, also used in the Crucial T710 and Lexar NM1090 Pro. The SM2508 has its own cache of dynamic random access memory (DRAM), unlike the controllers for so-called DRAM-less SSDs, which eschew their own memory cache and instead rely on their computer's host memory buffer (HMB).

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

(Puzzled by some of these terms? Check out our handy guide to SSD terminology.)

The Mars 980 Blade comes with a thin aluminum heat spreader that can be stuck on the side with the exposed chips (the controller and NAND flash). The spreader's compactness allows the SSD to easily fit in the secondary M.2 slot of a Sony PlayStation 5. Just keep in mind that the PS5 supports PCI Express 4.0, so when used in this manner, the Blade will revert to PCIe 4.0 speeds, which max out at about 5,000MBps.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The Mars 980 Blade is available in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities. Here's a breakdown of the currently available capacities and their cost per gigabyte based on list prices:

These prices place it among the most affordable PCI Express 5.0 SSDs, and as with many drives, the Blade's street price is typically lower than its list price.

As for durability, expressed as the lifetime write capacity in total terabytes written (TBW), the Mars 980 Blade's ratings are a notch above the Corsair MP700 Pro, the ADATA Legend 970, and the Gigabyte Aorus 10000 Gen 5, which are rated at 700TBW for 1TB and 1,400TBW for 2TB, in the capacities they share. The Blade's durability also exceeds that of the Crucial T700, T705, and T710, which are all rated at 600TBW, 1,200TBW, and 2,400TBW for their 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB models, respectively. The Seagate FireCuda 540 is the reigning Gen 5 durability champ, with ratings of 1,000TBW for the 1TB stick and 2,000TBW for 2TB.

The terabytes-written spec is a manufacturer's estimate of how much data can be written to a drive before some cells begin to fail and get taken out of service. ADATA covers the Mars 980 Blade with a five-year warranty, or until you hit the rated TBW figure in data writes, whichever comes first. But the drive's durability rating is such that unless you're writing unusually large amounts of data to the SSD, it's a safe bet that the Blade will last the full warranty period and well beyond.

The Mars 980 Blade works with ADATA SSD Toolbox, a utility suite that the company offers as a free download. It has a variety of tools, including drive health monitoring, diagnostics, optimization, benchmarking, and backups. For data security, the Blade supports the Pyrite specification for drive access control, but it does not encrypt the data.

Compatibility: Your Bus Fare May Be Hefty

PCIe 5.0 SSDs—even ones with considerably lower throughput speeds than the Mars 980 Blade—promise a major speed boost over PCIe 4.0 drives, but you can take advantage of it only if you have recent hardware that supports the standard. Only the latest boutique desktops and a handful of laptops are likely to be PCIe 5.0-ready off the shelf, so you may have to build your own PC from the ground up or update an existing system to gain the connectivity required. On desktops, you'll need an Intel 12th Gen or later Core CPU with a motherboard based on a late-model Intel chipset that supports PCIe 5.0 (generally, those from the Z690 generation or later); or an AMD Ryzen 7000 or 9000 processor with an AM5 motherboard built around a late-model chipset that supports PCIe 5.0 (in both cases, not all do).

Now, important point: Just because you have one of those chipsets doesn't guarantee that the motherboard maker actually implemented a PCIe 5.0-capable M.2 SSD slot. That's up to the board maker, so check your system's or motherboard's specs and documentation to make sure you actually have such a slot before investing in one of these drives. Some boards have PCIe 5.0 expansion slots for graphics cards and other PCI Express cards, but you need a PCIe 5.0-capable M.2 slot, specifically.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Speed Testing: PCMark 10 Performance Needs More Pep

In benchmarking the Blade, we used our latest testbed PC, designed specifically for benchmarking PCIe 5.0 M.2 SSDs. It consists of an ASRock X670E Taichi motherboard with an AMD X670 chipset, 32GB (two Crucial 16GB DIMMs) of DDR5 memory, one PCIe 5.0 x4 M.2 slot (with lanes that have direct access to the CPU), and three PCIe 4.0 slots. It sports an AMD Ryzen 9 7900 CPU using an AMD stock cooler; a GeForce RTX 2070 Super graphics card with 8GB of GDDR6 SDRAM; and a Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 Snow 750-watt power supply. The boot drive is an ADATA Legend 850 PCIe 4.0 SSD. We tested the Mars 980 Blade with its heat spreader attached and using our testbed's motherboard's own heatsink.

We put the Blade through our usual slate of internal solid-state drive benchmarks, comprising Crystal DiskMark 6.0, UL's PCMark 10 Storage, and UL's 3DMark Storage Benchmark. The last of these measures a drive's performance in various gaming-related tasks.

Crystal DiskMark Testing

Crystal DiskMark's sequential speed tests provide a traditional measure of drive throughput, simulating best-case, straight-line transfers of large files. We use them to determine if our tested speeds align with the manufacturer's rated speeds.

In our Crystal DiskMark testing, the Blade easily cleared its sequential read and write speed ratings, putting it among elite Gen 5 speedsters, as well as turning in impressive random 4K read and write results—the third-highest 4K read speed, after the WD Black SN8100 and Crucial T710, and the second-highest 4K write result, trailing only the SN8100. Good 4K write performance is especially important for an SSD used as a boot drive, though we test them as secondary drives.

PCMark 10 Testing

The PCMark 10 Overall Storage test measures an SSD's speed in performing a variety of routine tasks such as launching Windows, loading games and creative apps, and copying both small and large files. The Mars 980 Blade's score on this benchmark was at the bottom of the Gen 5 pack, although just short of the scores tallied by the Crucial P510 and Addlink G55H, the two DRAM-less Gen 5 SSDs we have reviewed. (Although ditching DRAM keeps an SSD's price down and reduces heat generation, in our experience, it can adversely affect performance in certain situations.)

On the individual tests that make up the PCMark 10 overall score—the so-called trace-based tests—many of the Mars 980 Blade's results were middling. It was also the slowest in the Photoshop launching test and the second slowest in the Windows boot test.

3DMark Storage Testing

The 3DMark Storage benchmark tests an SSD's proficiency in performing various gaming-related functions. In it, the Mars 980 Blade turned in the second-lowest score among our comparison group, ahead of just the Lexar NM1090 Pro. (See the last tab in the chart above.)

Based on its benchmark scores, the Mars is best for straight-line file transfers, archiving, and accessing data. Its scores generally put it near the bottom of the Gen 5 pack, closest to the DRAM-less SSDs and Lexar NM1090; it often lagged the two elite PCIe 4.0 SSDs in our comparison group, the Crucial T500 and WD Black SN850X.