To enhance the anti-inertia disturbance ability of permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) speed system, an adaptive sliding mode control with inertia identification is proposed. A novel sliding mode control (NSMC) based on a new reaching law coupled with model reference adaptive system (MRAS) inertia identification is realized the adaptive control, named MRAS+NSMC. In the NSMC construct process, an integral sliding mode surface and a variable speed reaching law are introduced to avoid speed differentiation and improve dynamics, respectively. And the new reaching law imported a successive sigmoid( s) to replace the traditional sign( s) to suppress chattering phenomena. For the problem that the performance deteriorated by rotational inertia variation caused by load changes, the inertia is estimated in real time according to the MRAS theory, and the identification value is updated to the NSMC controller to realize adaptive MRAS+NSMC speed control. Experimental results show that the proposed adaptive MRAS+NSMC control has a faster speed response, and the speed response time is reduced from 85 to 49 ms compared with conventional SMC control. In addition, it has strong robustness to inertia disturbances and high speed tracking accuracy. Compared with conventional SMC, the speed tracking accuracy of proposed MRAS+NSMC is increased from 12% to 4%. This makes the proposed MRAS+NSMC control has great potential practical significance for speed control of PMSM.