Back in September, we taught you how easy it is to upgrade your PS5 SSD. If you’re anything like us, you’ve already filled your built-in SSD and have found yourself revisiting guides like that one, exploring the idea of adding more storage. No one likes to delete old games just to install new ones, so in today’s review, we’re going to explore a new option from Kingston. The Fury Renegade aims to deliver outstanding speeds and high capacities to meet your needs for fast load times and massive storage. Does it deliver and is it a good value for the price?
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Specifications
- Current Price:
- Form factor: M.2 2280
- Interface: PCIe 4.0 NVMe
- Capacities: 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, 4TB
- Controller: Phison E18
- NAND: 3D TLC
- Sequential read/write
- 500GB – 7,300/3,900MB/s
- 1TB – 7,300/6,000MB/s
- 2TB – 7,300/7,000MB/s
- 4TB – 7,300/7,000MB/s
- Random 4K read/write
- 500GB – up to 450,000/900,000 IOPS
- 1TB – up to 900,000/1,000,000 IOPS
- 2TB – up to 1,000,000/1,000,000 IOPS
- 4TB – up to 1,000,000/1,000,000 IOPS
- Total Bytes Written (TBW)
- 500GB – 500TBW
- 1TB – 1.0PBW
- 2TB – 2.0PBW
- 4TB – 4.0PBW
- Power consumption
- 500GB – 5mW idle / 0.34W avg / 2.7W (MAX) read / 4.1W (MAX) write
- 1TB – 5mW idle / 0.33W avg / 2.8W (MAX) read / 6.3W (MAX) write
- 2TB – 5mW idle / 0.36W avg / 2.8W (MAX) read / 9.9W (MAX) write
- 4TB – 5mW idle / 0.36W avg / 2.7W (MAX) read / 10.2W (MAX) write
- Dimensions
- 80mm x 22mm x 2.21mm (500GB-1TB)
- 80mm x 22mm x 3.5mm (2TB-4TB)
- Weight
- 500GB-1TB – 7g
- 2TB-4TB – 9.7g
- MTBF 1,800,000 hours
- Warranty/Support: Limited 5-year warranty with free technical support
Kingston Fury Renegade - Overview
The Kingston Fury Renegade is a PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSD. Though this article will focus on using it with the PlayStation 5, it will also work well in any desktop or computer or laptop that supports PCIe Gen 4. It’s also backward compatible with PCIe Gen 3 but will, of course, only operate at Gen 3 speeds. It features a built-in heat spreader, a necessity for PlayStation 5, to ensure thermal throttling doesn’t become an issue in normal use. As of this writing, it is available in 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities and uses 3D TLC NAND flash for improved speeds and durability compared to QLC.
The Fury Renegade is a Gen 4 x 4 drive and pushes the limits on its maximum specced speeds. Kingston claims that the drive is able to deliver up to 7300 MB/s in sequential read speeds across every capacity. Maximum sequential write speeds increase with drive size, beginning at 3900 MB/s and topping out at 7000 MB/s with the 2TB and 4TB variants. Of course, real-world tasks are rarely sequential. For randomized operations, the drive is rated at 450,000 read and 900,000 write IOPS for the 500GB version, 900,000 read and 1,000,000 write IOPS, and 1,000,000 each for the 2TB and 4TB versions.
The drives also feature impressively large lifespans. The 500GB version promises 500 TBW, whereas the 1TB model jumps to 1PBW (that’s petabyte written) for the 1TB mode, 2PBW for the 2TB, and 4PBW for the 4TB model. Each drive is also protected by a 5-year limited warranty. The concern over durability with NVMe SSDs finally seems to have abated and this kind of reliability proves why. The Fury Renegade isn’t alone with this level of durability (it’s pretty well in line with the competition) but it’s reassuring to see those high PBW counts and the warranty behind the purchase here.
One of the Fury Renegade’s more unique elements is its low-profile heat spreader. At first glance, I actually mistook it for a sticker until I turned the drive on its side and caught the gleam of metal. Rather than use a thick and bulky heatsink like the Corsair MP600, the Fury Renegade uses an ultra-thin graphene aluminum heatspreader. It’s a perfect fit for the PS5 but also helps the drive fit comfortably beneath bulky graphics cards in a PC setup.
The Fury Renegade line-up offers a welcome range of features with big promises of price and performance, but it does come at a bit of a premium that jumps to a major premium with the higher capacity drivers. The 500GB and 1TB drives retail for $114.99 and $189.99 respectively, placing both in the middle of the pack in terms of price. Given their extremely competitive speeds, the pricing isn’t bad. Jumping to the 2TB model raises the price to $424.99 and $1069.99 for the 4TB model which is expensive enough that it leads me to wonder who the audience is. There are excellent drives for hundreds of dollars less, so most users are going to be best suited sticking with the 500GB and 1TB models until the prices of the higher-tier models come in line.
Kingston Fury Renegade - Performance
Most of my testing of the SSD was done on PlayStation 5 with real-world gaming, but I did pop it into my test system to run some preliminary checks.
In ATTO, a synthetic best-case-scenario benchmark, I found Kingston’s claims to be spot on. This is often the case (or close to it) because it supplies the drive with the best opportunity to demonstrate burst speeds. It’s not representative of most actual use scenarios, however.
My next stop was to CrystalDiskMark. This is another synthetic benchmark but is able to test a drive using randomized sequences in addition to its own sequential assessments. Here, the drive peaked at 7.2MB/s and 6.9MB/s for sequential reads and writes; a little less, but still very good. For the randomized test (4k32), the drive came in at 1.3MB/s in read speeds and 1.1MB/s for writes.
The aluminum graphene heat spreader also seems to be doing the job nicely for real-world use. In my tests, even when the drive was under load copying a 40GB file directory, it peaked at 64C and did not thermal throttle. Pushing the temperature higher required slowing my case fans to a crawl and running a benchmark on top of a large file transfer, which isn’t something that’s going to impact normal users, so I consider this a good result.
But how did it do on PS5?
As you can see, it performed right alongside the built-in SSD on the PlayStation 5. Load times were within two seconds on the four games I tested, which I consider within the margin of error. Also note that these tests were done after the system had been on and played for around thirty minutes, so it had the chance to heat up. As an upgrade drive, it’s a solid bet.
Final Thoughts
Taken as a whole, the Kingston Fury Renegade is a solid, low profile NVME. It offers speedy performance at a reasonable price for the two smaller capacities. I’m dismayed at how much more expensive the 2TB option is considering how good its performance was, as the jump to $400+ makes it an impossible recommendation to make compared to the competition. So, for now, my recommendation is limited to the 1TB model, which is specced very similarly and is also much cheaper.
The product described in this article was provided by the manufacturer for evaluation purposes.
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