Kingston Fury Renegade 2TB SSD (with heatsink) Review

The original version of Kingston's Fury Renegade came with a low-profile graphene aluminium heat spreader. Now Kingston has launched a version of the drive with a fully-fledged heatsink which makes the drive compatible with the PS5. The two-part aluminium heatsink, in the case of our 2TB review sample, adds 7mm to the height of the drive and 25g to its weight. Inside the heatsink are two full-length thermal pads that sandwich the drive.

The Heatsink version of the drive has the same capacity lineup as the original drive; 500GB, 1TB, 2TB and a flagship 4TB model. The Fury Renegade uses the well-tried and tested combination of a Phison PS5018-E18 controller and 176-layer 3D TLC NAND.

All four drives in the range are rated up to 7,300MB/s for Sequential reads with Sequential writes varying with capacity so the 500GB drive is rated up to 3,900MB/s, the 1TB drive up to 6,000MB/s while the 2TB and 4TB models get the same up to 7,000MB/s rating.

As for 4K random read performance, the 500GB drive is rated as up to 450,000 IOPS and the 1TB drive up to 900,000 IOPS. The 2TB and 4TB drives are both rated up to 1,000,000 IOPS. Random write performance is quoted as up to 900,000 IOPS for the 500GB drive and up to 1,000,000 IOPS for the remaining three models.

The best Sequential read test score we saw was the 7,430MB/s when using our custom 128KB settings for CrystalDiskMark 8, which not only confirmed the official figure of 7,300MB/s, it bettered it too. When it came to Sequential write performance the nearest we could get to the maximum official figure of 7,000MB/s was the 6,921MB/s obtained from using the Peak Performance profile in CrystalDiskMark8 with the 0 fill option.

With our 4-threaded testing, we couldn't get close to the official 1,000,000 IOPS for both random reads and writes.  The best random read figure we saw was 409,265 IOPS (QD16) while the best write figure was 328,531 IOPS. Using CrystalDiskMark's default Peak Performance profile we got a test result of 667,476.81 IOPS with the best write figure, 545,735.35 IOPS coming from using the 0 fill option of the Peak Performance profile.

The combination of an aluminium heatsink and a pair of thermal pads works reasonably well at keeping the drive cool. The hottest the drive got when being pushed hard during benchmarking runs was 47°C, 23°C below the maximum operating temperature.

Kingston’s SSD management utility, SSD Manager, may not be as feature-rich as some of its competitors but without all the bells and whistles and funky GUIs, it will automatically detect any firmware updates as well as display drive status, temperatures and SMART information.

We found the 2TB Fury Renegade Heatsink on Kingston's site for £229.25 HERE.

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Pros

• Overall performance.
• Endurance.
• Well-designed heatsink.
• 5-year warranty.

Cons

• Couldn't confirm the maximum official 4K figures under testing.
• No AES hardware encryption.

KitGuru says: Kingston's Fury Renegade Heatsink is a fast-performing drive that makes use of the tried and tested Phison E18 and 176-layer 3D TLC NAND combination. The heatsink adds around a tenner to the price of the standard Fury Renegade which these days seems pretty reasonable. Having said that the pricing could just do with a small tweak to make it really competitive.

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