Kingston Fury Renegade 2TB

AS A MEASURE of just how successful the Phison E18 PCIe Gen 4 controller chip for SSDs has become, consider that the Kingston Fury Renegade 2TB isn’t even alone among Kingston’s M.2 drives in using it. The Kingston KC3000 also packs the E18 controller.

Among the SSDs tested this issue, you can also add the PNY XLR8 CS3140 and Seagate Firecuda 530 to the list of E18 groupies. All of which begs the question why? What is it that makes the

E18 so popular? The Phison PS5018-E18, to use its full nomenclature, is an eightchannel controller produced on TSMC’s 12nm process. It comes configured with five CPU cores in total, three of which use ARM’s Cortex R5 IP with the remaining two designed by Phison itself.

All told, Phison reckons the E18 is good for 7.4GB/s sequential read performance and 7GB/s writes, plus the minor matter of one million IOPS. Those sequential numbers aren’t far off the peak 8GB/s theoretical throughput of a quad-lane

PCIe 4.0 M.2 interface, which this and every other SSD this month use. So, it’s a pretty serious bit of kit.

As it happens, Kingston’s specs for this implementation of the E18 mostly align with Phison’s. Peak reads for this 2TB version of the Fury Renegade are rated at 7,300MB/s, with the full 7,000MB/s for writes and once again one million claimed IOPS. Controller aside, Kingston says the Fury Renegade uses TLC NAND without going into specifics.

However, we’re pretty confident it uses Micron’s latest 176-layer chips. And that’s a good thing. We say that without peeling off the thin aluminum heat spreader. It would be a pity to do that, what with its fancy layer of graphene for optimized thermal conductivity.

Intriguingly, the Fury Renegade drive actually has slightly less usable space at any given capacity compared with its KC3000 Kingston sibling. That enables greater redundancy provision for the Fury Renegade and in turn superior write endurance.

The 2TB KC3000 is rated at 1,600TB of writes, but the 2TB Fury Renegade achieves a fairly epic 2,000TB. Of course, hardly anyone is going to run into the 1,600TB wall in the real world. But endurance to spare is always reassuring, especially for the long haul.

Speaking of provisioning, this drive also had a healthy allocation of highperformance SLC cache.

Peak sustained performance is maintained for fully 700GB before the SLC cache runs out and the underlying performance of the TLC chips is exposed. That’s a lot of data to be getting on with and means that this drive will rarely fall back on TLC as opposed to SLC performance.

Inevitably, there’s a fair amount of overlap among Phison-powered drives when it comes to performance. You’d struggle to squeeze a cigarette paper between the Fury and the Seagate Firecuda 530 when it comes to peak sequential performance, even if it’s actually the XPG Gammix S70 that knocks out the highest read speeds of all.

As for 4K random access performance, it’s a similar story here, too. The Fury is up there with the best. It also cranked out a particularly good result in PCMark 10’s full drive test, topping the tables with 3,177 points.

Just as impressive, this drive runs nice and cool despite lacking a fat heatsink. Our peak measured temperature of 44°C makes it unlikely you’ll ever run into problems with thermal throttling. It also bodes well for longevity in terms of reduced thermal stress on the drive’s PCB. All of which means this is a good SSD with just one problem. Like the other Phison-powered 2TB drive, the Seagate Firecuda 530, it’s hellishly pricey.