Today we are taking a look at the KLEVV CRAS C920 1TB NVMe SSD. KLEVV is a brand I had never heard of before; Patrick went looking for drives on Amazon and ran across the KLEVV drives at a decent price and thought they might warrant a look. Up until now, PCIe 4.0 drives have mostly existed in the realm of ‘name brand’ SSDs, and this is my first opportunity to test a smaller brand-type drive. With that said, the CRAS C920 seems to be assembled from quality components; it features a Phison controller, TLC NAND, and a DRAM cache.
KLEVV C920 1TB NVMe SSD
The KLEVV C920 1TB comes in a single-sided M.2 2280 (80mm) form factor.
Unlike most other PCIe 4.0 SSDs, the KLEVV CRAS C920 is not offered with a bundled heatsink; depending on thermal performance this could be a good or bad thing. Beneath the product label sticker are all the components for the SSD. There is a Phison PS5018-E18 controller, which we have seen on other high-end SSDs like the Gigabyte AORUS 7000s and Seagate FireCuda 530 (the Seagate drive review will be online in the next week.) Bundled with that controller is Micron TLC NAND, though I am not sure on the exact specs of that NAND. Rounding out the configuration there is a 1GB DDR4 cache.
The rear of the drive has unused pads. These are populated on the 2TB variant of this drive.
KLEVV CRAS C920 Specs
The KLEVV CRAS C920 line SSDs are available in 1TB and 2TB capacities.
Specs for the CRAS C920 look fairly standard for a 1TB PCIe 4.0 drive. This is a 1024 GB drive and not a 1000 GB drive, so it is ever so slightly larger capacity than many of the ‘1TB’ drives we test for what that is worth. 7000 MB/s sequential read and 5500 MB/s sequential write are good, and a 700 TBW endurance is above average. The 5-year warranty is good to see; on value-oriented drives, the warranty is typically one of the first sacrifices made to keep costs down.
The reliability of a warranty is always a question for an unknown manufacturer; what use is a 5-year warranty if the company providing the component goes out of business or has unreachable tech support? KLEVV-branded drives are warranted by ESSENCORE, presumably their corporate owner. They first direct users to their reseller for warranty support, and failing that provide an email form for obtaining warranty/RMA service.
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: ASUS PRIME X570-P
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X (12C/24T)
- RAM: 2x 16GB DDR4-3200 UDIMMs
Our testing uses the KLEVV C920 1TB as the boot drive for the system, installed in the M.2_1 slot on the motherboard. 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.
For the record, KLEVV was initially SK Hynix brand to enter the consumer market. I have RAM module from them when they were part of SK Hynix. Then in 2016, I don’t know what happened, but SK Hynix decided to sell KLEVV and use their proper brand instead. Obviously, when KLEVV was owned by SK Hynix, their stuff was top quality and competing with Samsung and Micron, still at a lower price.
Nowadays, under Essencore umbrella, it may be a different story…