Kingston Fury Renegade 2TB NVMe SSD Review

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Kingston Renegade 2TB Performance Testing

We test using both the default smaller test size and larger test sets on our benchmarks. This allows us to see the difference between lighter and heavier workloads.

CrystalDiskMark x64

CrystalDiskMark is used as a basic starting point for benchmarks as it is something commonly run by end-users as a sanity check.

Kingston Renegade 2TB CrystalDiskMark 1GB
Kingston Renegade 2TB CrystalDiskMark 1GB
Kingston Renegade 2TB CrystalDiskMark 1GB Chart
Kingston Renegade 2TB CrystalDiskMark 1GB Chart

The Kingston Fury Renegade 2TB gets 97% of the way to nailing its rated speeds, but not quite there. It is close enough that I will give it a pass, though. Just as importantly, you can see the Renegade is right in line with the other high-end Gen 4 drives on my chart.

Kingston Renegade 2TB CrystalDiskMark 8GB
Kingston Renegade 2TB CrystalDiskMark 8GB
Kingston Renegade 2TB CrystalDiskMark 8GB Chart
Kingston Renegade 2TB CrystalDiskMark 8GB Chart

The larger CrystalDiskMark test lets the Renegade stretch its legs a tiny bit, and it now hits its rated 7300 MB/s read speed, though it is still only 97% of the way there on the write speed. It is good enough for me!

ATTO Disk Benchmark

The ATTO Disk Benchmark has been a staple of drive sequential performance testing for years. ATTO was tested at both 256MB and 8GB file sizes.

Kingston Renegade 2TB ATTO 256MB
Kingston Renegade 2TB ATTO 256MB
Kingston Renegade 2TB ATTO 256MB Chart
Kingston Renegade 2TB ATTO 256MB Chart

ATTO sequential results are pretty consistent across the board, and the Kingston Renegade follows the trend of performance coming in slightly below what CrystalDiskMark shows. Importantly, the performance is consistent and up at the top-end of my Gen 4 drive pool.

Kingston Renegade 2TB ATTO 8GB
Kingston Renegade 2TB ATTO 8GB
Kingston Renegade 2TB ATTO 8GB Chart
Kingston Renegade 2TB ATTO 8GB Chart

The larger ATTO test shows some performance variability across the span of the test with regards to write speed, though not to a catastrophic level. The Renegade 2TB still turns in very good read results, though the write speed takes a small hit.

Anvil’s Storage Utilities

Anvil’s Storage Utilities is a comprehensive benchmark that gives us a very in-depth look at the performance of the drives tested. This benchmark was run with both a 1GB and 8GB test size.

Kingston Renegade 2TB Anvil 1GB
Kingston Renegade 2TB Anvil 1GB
Kingston Renegade 2TB Anvil 1GB Chart
Kingston Renegade 2TB Anvil 1GB Chart

Anvil results for the Kingston Renegade 2TB are a bit mixed. Read score is fairly low for a high-end Gen 4 drive, but write score is top tier. Phison-based drives tend to do very well in write score on Anvil, so I am not surprised by that result.

Kingston Renegade 2TB Anvil 8GB
Kingston Renegade 2TB Anvil 8GB
Kingston Renegade 2TB Anvil 8GB Chart
Kingston Renegade 2TB Anvil 8GB Chart

The best thing that can be said for the read score on the larger Anvil test is that the Renegade does not drop in performance. That said, it is still riding the bottom of the chart for my Gen4 drives. Write score, as before, is still very good.

AS SSD Benchmark

AS SSD Benchmark is another good benchmark for testing SSDs. We run all three tests for our series. Like other utilities, it was run with both the default 1GB as well as a larger 10GB test set.

Kingston Renegade 2TB ASSSD 1GB
Kingston Renegade 2TB AS SSD 1GB
Kingston Renegade 2TB ASSSD 1GB Chart
Kingston Renegade 2TB AS SSD 1GB Chart

Performance in AS SSD is much improved over Anvil, with the Renegade  turning in middle-of-the-pack read scores and top-end write scores. Unlike Anvil, AS SSD does not intrinsically seem to perform better on Phison-based drives, so this is pretty good to see.

Kingston Renegade 2TB ASSSD 10GB
Kingston Renegade 2TB AS SSD 10GB
Kingston Renegade 2TB ASSSD 10GB Chart
Kingston Renegade 2TB AS SSD 10GB Chart

Read score dips a little in the larger AS SSD test, enough to drop a few positions on the chart. Write score, on the other hand, holds very strong and the Kingston Renegade is top of the Gen 4 write score chart.

SPECworkstation, thermals, and our conclusion are up next.

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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