Kingston FURY Renegade Overview
Can we do an unboxing without a real box?
Let’s start with the packaging, which has been reduced to the bare minimum. It must be said that it is a bit light for a product costing several hundred euros. But the disk is still well protected, since it is under a particularly rigid plastic protection. Certainly it is a good point for the environment, but some will regret the absence of a real box.
As the photo above illustrates, the plastic protection is inseparable from the packaging. At least not without having to rip out the entire box. Inside, in other words, between the two layers of cardboard, we find an OEM license for Acronis True image HD. This allows you to clone your previous disk or make backups of your data before reinstalling your operating system.
Quick overview of the disc itself
On the front panel, a very thin aluminum heat sink, covered with a layer of graphene allows to dissipate heat. In the center, we find the brand and its logo, on the right the range and on the left the information on the format and the interface. At the back, no graphene. We find once again the brand, the storage capacity, the product reference, the serial number, the version of the ” firmware “. We also note that the label also serves as a warranty seal, as evidenced by the message ” Warranty void if removed “.
We can also check the presence of firmware update with the Kingston SSD Manager software. The update should be able to be done directly from the software (we did not have the opportunity to test it), and it gives us different information like the S.M.A.R.T report, the temperature or the events related to the disk.
What’s under the hood?
As a main component, the new Kingston FURY Renegade relies on the Phison PS5018-E18 controller (Datasheet), which is also found on other high-end SSDs, such as the Seagate FireCuda 530.
The choice of this controller is interesting since the Phison E18, engraved in 12 nm by TSMC and operating at 1 Ghz, is known not to heat up too much. It is based on a triple-core Arm Cortex R5 CPU architecture. In order to offload the routine and repetitive code operations of the firmware, there is a dual-core coprocessor. All of this is intended to speed up write operations thanks to larger operation queues. As a result, we can expect to get record performance from this controller, which can fully exploit the PCIe 4.0 x4 interface.
The controller connects eight 256GB 3D TLC flash memory modules. The chips are the latest Micron 176-layer 3D TLC NAND B47R (renamed Kingston FB25608UCM1-9E) . They are located on both sides of the PCB. These are configurations that can be found on other SSDs of other brands. However, each manufacturer adapts its own firmware version.
Although the speed of an SSD depends mainly on the speed of the controller and the memory chips, the distribution of the eight chips in parallel makes it possible to increase the writing speed. This is probably one of the reasons why the 512gb and 1TB versions have advertised sequential write speeds of 3,900MB/s and 6000MB/s.
Finally, the controller is backed up by 2GB of Kingston DRAM for the SSD’s mapping tables. However, the size of the SLC cache remains unknown.
Kingston FURY Renegade technical sheet
- Brand: Kingston
- Series: FURY Renegade
- Reference product: SFYRD/2000G
- Storage capacity: 2Tb
- Format: M.2 2280
- Interface: PCIe 4.0 NVMe 1.4
- Controller: Phison E18 (PS5018-E18)
- NAND: 3D TLC Micron B47R 176-layer
- Dimensions: 80 mm x 22 mm x 3.5 mm
- Weight: 9.7 grams
- Max sequential speed: 7300 MB/s read and 7000 MB/s write
- 4K random read/write: up to 1,000,000 / 1,000,000 IOPS
- Total number of written bytes (TOE ) : 2 POE (Peta Bytes)
- Mean time to failure: 1,800,000 hours
- Warranty: 5 years
A “gamer” SSD?
To say the least, these features are impressive on paper.
Let’s stop on an interesting figure which is the TOE, for Tera bytes written (TWB in English), of 2 POE (that is to say 2000 To). More concretely, it is a value used to give an estimation of the life of the SSD.
For our FURY Renegade, a quick calculation of the TWB based on the five-year warranty means that it will be possible to fill and empty a little more than half of the total capacity of the SSD every day. That’s still about 1.1 TB written and deleted daily for five years (2000 TB written / 1825 days = 1.09 TB / day).
This figure is important and helps justify the name “Gamer SSD”, in addition to the overall speed of the SSD. The Kingston FURY Renegade is also compatible with the PS5. The official product page promotes this compatibility through visuals and a video of the installation of the SSD in the latest console from Sony.
Let’s remember that nowadays, it is not uncommon to have games that are well over 100GB. On the 1TB version, this means not being able to install more than 10 games at the same time. This is an important detail for players who are forced to delete and re-download their games regularly (provided they have a good internet connection of course)
