INTRODUCTION

   PCIe 5.0 Gen5 SSD models may be leading the market in terms of raw read & write performance but with the vast majority of systems currently supporting PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 4.0 connectivity Gen3 and Gen4 SSDs aren't going anywhere, not anytime soon at least. NAND controller manufacturers may not have much of their resources aimed towards the design development of Gen4 SSDs but with performance numbers even surpassing 7000MB/s for some models they don't really have to. Last year Kingston unveiled their FURY Renegade line of PCIe 4.0 Gen4 M.2 SSDs and after testing the near-excellent 2TB capacity variant (review here) today and after quite a few requests by some of you I’ll be testing the 4TB capacity variant.

   Kingston Technology Europe Co LLP and Kingston Technology Company, Inc., are part of the same corporate group (“Kingston”). Kingston is the world’s largest independent manufacturer of memory products. From big data, to laptops and PCs, to IoT-based devices like smart and wearable technology, to design-in and contract manufacturing, Kingston helps deliver the solutions used to live, work and play. The world’s largest PC makers and cloud-hosting companies depend on Kingston for their manufacturing needs, and our passion fuels the technology the world uses every day. We strive beyond our products to see the bigger picture, to meet the needs of our customers and offer solutions that make a difference. To learn more about how Kingston Is With You, visit Kingston.com.

   The FURY Renegade line of PCIe 4.0 Gen4 SSDs includes models both with and without an aluminum heatsink (PS5 compatible) and in 4 different capacities (500GB/1TB/2TB/4TB). Under the hood of the FURY Renegade, we find the 8-channel tri-core (32-bit ARM Cortex R5 CPUs) PS5018-E18 NVMe v1.4 compatible NAND flash controller by PHISON paired with 176-layer 3D TLC NAND flash and 4GB of DDR4L SDRAM by Micron for the 4TB model i have here with me today. The PS5018-E18 NAND flash controller by PHISON features their 4th Gen LDPC engine (low-density parity check) along with end-to-end data path protection, wear levelling, thermal throttling (70 degrees Celsius limit), TRIM, bad block management, dynamic range SLC cache and SmartECC (RAID ECC). Once again Kingston covers the entire FURY Renegade line with a 5-year limited warranty and as for endurance numbers it reports 500TBW for the 500GB model, 1000TBW for the 1TB model, 2000TBW for the 2TB model and 4000TBW for the 4TB model (MTBF of 1.8 million hours is the same for all models).