Kingston Fury Renegade 2TB NVMe SSD Review

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Kingston Fury Renegade 2TB
Kingston Fury Renegade 2TB

Today, we are looking at the Kingston Fury Renegade 2TB NVMe SSD. Kingston is an old brand that has been around as long as I have been interested in computers, and it has been a while (3+ years) since we have looked at a Kingston SSD, so I thought it was time. While previous Kingston drives I have looked at were all low-end components, the Fury Renegade is targeted at the high-end PCIe Gen4 market, so I have high hopes for its performance. The name Fury Renegade is a bit unwieldy, and Kingston swaps focus between the word Fury and Renegade, so you will have to forgive me if I just shorten it to Renegade for this review.

Kingston Fury Renegade 2TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD

The Kingston Renegade 2TB comes in a double-sided M.2 2280 (80mm) form factor.

Kingston Renegade 2TB Front
Kingston Renegade 2TB Front

The Fury Renegade is available both with and without a heatsink, and my test drive is the bare drive model. The Amazon listing says it has a graphene heat spreader, but as a preview of the thermal results, I can say it is not very effective. Regardless, what we have here is a fairly standard Phison PS5018 controller and Micron 176-layer TLC. This is the same combination of hardware seen in the Seagate FireCuda 530, which is an excellent drive. As a high-end Gen4 drive, the Renegade also comes equipped with a DDR4 DRAM cache.

Kingston Renegade 2TB Back
Kingston Renegade 2TB Back

The backside of the Kingston Renegade 2TB contains half of the DRAM and half the NAND beneath the white product label. Some installation locations can only accept single sided drives, so keep that in mind.

Kingston Renegade 2TB SSD Specs

The Kingston Renegade Fury 2TB is available between 500GB and 4TB capacity points.

Kingston Renegade 2TB Specs
Kingston Renegade 2TB Specs

The 2TB model comes rated for 7300 MB/s read and 7000 MB/s write, which is at the top-end of Gen 4 drives. Given the pedigree of this specific Phison controller and NAND combination, the potential certainly exists to hit those marks.

Endurance is rated at 2 PBW for the 2TB drive, which is excellent. My standard for endurance on a 2TB drive is normally 1200 TBW, so 2 PBW has quite a lead on that number. The warranty is the industry standard 5-year as well, and as mentioned before Kingston is an old and well-known brand.

Kingston Renegade 2TB CrystalDiskInfo
Kingston Renegade 2TB CrystalDiskInfo

CrystalDiskInfo can give us some basic information about the SSD and confirms we are operating at PCIe 4.0 x4 speeds using NVMe 1.4.

Test System Configuration

We are using the following configuration for this test:

  • Motherboard: MSI MAG X670E Tomahawk
  • CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7900X (12C/24T)
  • RAM: 2x 16GB DDR5-6000 UDIMMs

Our testing uses the Kingston Renegade 2TB as the boot drive for the system, installed in the M.2_1 slot on the motherboard. This slot supports up to PCIe Gen 5 x4. The drive is filled to 85% capacity with data, and then some is deleted, leaving around 60% used space on the volume.

Next, we are going to get into our performance testing.

2 COMMENTS

  1. Friendly reminder to update the firmware on that drive. There is a stale read issue on that drive (and others using the Phison E18) that is addressed with an update to EIFK31.7 – your Crystaldisk Info shot shows that you’re still on EIFK31.2.

    https://www.kingston.com/en/support/technical/ksm-firmware-update

    “Firmware Rev. EIFK31.7 (07-08-2024)
    • Improved decoding flow to prevent excessive latency found on certain
    platforms”

    This manifests as the drive dropping to ~10MB/s when reading files that have been left inaccessed for some time (usually months, an example of which would be installed games or media that has not been accessed recently). An increase in extremely high access latency for those cells can also be seen with drive scan tools.

    Some people have reported the same with E18 based Seagate Firecuda 530 drives, but I don’t know if Seagate has yet addressed it. They hadn’t when I first looked into it a few months ago.

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