Kingston Fury Renegade G5

Kingston has finally launched a PCIe 5.0 drive, unsurprisingly called "G5". The reason for the delay is probably that they wanted to reach the 14,000+ MB/s segment - the really hardcore part - also known as 5.0x4. For obvious reasons, we have not been able to test the drive earlier, but we generally have good experiences with Kingston in terms of reliability and generally recommend sticking to brand names when it comes to fragile memory and RAM.

The price is around £300 for the 2TB model we have tested here. The price difference with and without a cooler is approximately £10, regardless of model. The 4TB model costs just over £560. That's still a bit expensive in my opinion, but on the other hand, you can't really complain about the performance.

The memory is 3D TLC NAND in 218 layers, which is used by many others. It is relatively cheap to produce, lasts for many years, and, as you can read at the beginning of this text, it is fast. The disadvantage is that it cannot withstand as many write cycles, but you can compensate for this by putting more of it in the product and thus achieving the same durability, without it costing a lot.

Kingston uses an SM2508 controller, which is known for being extra power efficient in its management of individual cells. There is 1 GB of cache per 1TB of drive capacity. The drive comes with a five-year warranty, but since the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) - i.e. the expected lifetime of the drive - is stated as two million hours (equivalent to 228 years), you can safely expect more than just five years of service life. In addition, the endurance - i.e. how much data can be written onto the drive - is one petabyte per TB capacity. In this case, with 2TB, this means that the drive can be written onto at maximum speed without interruption or slowdown for over 54 hours straight.

The theoretical transfer speed is stated as 14,700 MB/s. The highest we measured was 14,398 MB/s. Not quite up there - but when we ran another test (CrystalDisk), we reached 14,759 MB/s in read speed and 14,099 MB/s in write speed. Different software tests in different ways with different amounts of data in varying block sizes, so the results are never identical to reality. I often do a manual backup of about 700 GB of data - some of it just needs to be moved, some of it needs to be moved and overwritten - and even though it's the same drives transferring the data, the speed and especially the total time vary enormously. Large amounts of data can sometimes drop to around 350 MB/s. For example, ATTO Benchmark showed speeds 700-800 MB/s lower than CrystalDisk, and my manual transfers were about half of CrystalDisk's measurements.

The drive does not get very hot, around 35 degrees. That's excellent, but actually so cool that it can affect the speed. The memory cells have an optimal operating temperature, which, if I remember correctly, is slightly higher. The price is high for 2TB, but in general, the price for drives that can deliver 14,500+ MB/s is always high. Every time you go up a little in speed on PCIe 5.0-based NVMe drives, the price increases significantly. I would like to see them make a version with, for example, 10,000 MB/s and a price of £180. But on the other hand, it's understandable that they only want to offer a product in the absolute top class - and the price reflects that.