Kingston Fury Renegade 2TB NVMe SSD Review

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SPECworkstation 3.0.2 Storage Benchmark

SPECworkstation benchmark is an excellent benchmark to test systems using workstation-type workloads. In this test, we only ran the Storage component, which is fifteen separate tests.

Kingston Renegade 2TB SPECws
Kingston Renegade 2TB SPECws
Kingston Renegade 2TB SPECws Chart
Kingston Renegade 2TB SPECws Chart

Performance in SPECworkstation for the Renegade 2TB is somewhere between middling and worse than expected given the rest of my benchmark results. With a name like Fury Renegade this drive is targeting gamers and not professional workloads, and a glance at these SPEC results will reinforce that market positioning.

Sustained Write Performance

This is not necessarily a benchmark so much as trying to catch the post-cache write speed of the drive. While I am filling the drive with data to the 85% mark with ten simultaneous write threads, I monitor the drive for the write performance to dip to the lowest steady point and grab a screenshot.

Kingston Renegade 2TB Post Cache Write Speed
Kingston Renegade 2TB Post Cache Write Speed
Kingston Renegade 2TB Post Cache Write Speed Chart
Kingston Renegade 2TB Post Cache Write Speed Chart

Long term sequential write speed comes in at 1300 MB/s. For almost any consumer that is going to be more than enough, though it falls short of the best drives I have tested.

Temperatures

We monitored the idle and maximum temperature during testing with HWMonitor to get some idea of the thermal performance and requirements of the drive.

Kingston Renegade 2TB Temps Chart
Kingston Renegade 2TB Temps Chart

Thermal performance for the Renegade 2TB is pretty typical for this component mix. This drive gets hot. The drive began thermally throttling when it hit 79C, so I applied a heatsink for all my testing. If you are looking for something more thermally or energy efficient, you might consider the WD SN7100 that I recently reviewed. For users without a SSD heatsink built into their motherboard, you might consider the model that comes with a heatsink.

Final Words

The Kingston Renegade 2TB (no heatsink) is $145 at the time of this review, which is a pretty good value for a drive of this caliber. The Seagate Firecuda 530 is $217, and the WD SN7100 is $160, though the SN850X remains a good deal on its own at $151. The pricing for this drive is definitely on the lower-end for this level of performance, which is great.

Kingston Renegade 2TB Box
Kingston Renegade 2TB Box

I like this drive, especially at $145. It somewhat reminds me of the Inland Performance Plus drive, but with a much more household brand name. Lots of SSDs are built from essentially the same mix of components, and sometimes the only thing they really have to differentiate them is price and brand, and the Kingston Fury Renegade does well on both fronts.

The WD SN850X is still a ridiculously good deal, and so it should be considered. But right behind that drive I now see the Fury Renegade representing a very tempting option for someone who wants top-end performance at a value price.

Where to Buy

We purchased this drive on Amazon (Affiliate link.)

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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