By I think Kingston is a fantastic business. In addition to producing excellent, low-cost gear, it also sells items that consistently rank at the top. The Fury Renegade G5 NVMe SSD is one instance of the latter. It’s not inexpensive, but it’s also not unaffordable. Aside from Seagate’s professional SSDs, it also offers the most generous TBW rating.
What features does the Kingston Renegade G5 have?
Will the Renegade G5 get out of your system and start a war? (Hopefully not!) It is a PCIe 5.0 x4 NVMe SSD with a stacked, 218-layer BiCS8 TLC NAND and a Silicon Motion SM2508G controller.
Additionally, it is a DRAM design, with 1GB of valuable primary cache for each terabyte of capacity, based on the chip number (Micron D8CJG) in our 4TB review unit.
If you haven’t read it already, host memory buffer (HMB) architectures are generally just as fast when transferring huge files. Still, DRAM as the primary cache is much faster at random operations.
Kingston offers the Fury Renegade G5 with a five-year warranty. One petabyte (1PB/1000TB) per 1TB of capacity is one of the industry’s most liberal TBW (terabytes that may be written) values, which “limits” this. The industry average is 600TBW, although the BICS8 NAND appears to be catching up. Go, Kingston, go!
Keep in mind that TBW only applies to writes and deletions; readings, which examine cell voltage rather than alter it, have no limit.
The Kingston Fury Renegade G5 costs how much?
Currently, the Renegade G5 comes in 1TB/$165, 2TB/$240, and 4TB/$450 capacities; an 8TB model is expected to be released in November. As of this writing, those are the “discounted” pricing that we could find on Kingston’s Amazon site.
Given the generous TBW ratings, the lowered costs are competitive with the similarly performing PCIe 5.0/DRAM competitors indicated in the performance charts.
What is the speed of the Kingston Fury Renegade G5?
The WD Black SN8100 was just a hair away from taking the top spot on the PCIe 5.0 chart from the Fury Renegade G5. It placed close to the top in every test except for the one in which it was the fastest.
The other drives, Crucial’s T710, Samsung’s 9100 Pro, and the previously mentioned SN8100, all had their moments.
In the sequential throughput tests conducted by CrystalDiskMark 8, the G5 performed exceptionally well, outperforming its competitors in three of the four tests.
While queued random performance wasn’t poor, it wasn’t as good as the sequential writing (or other drives) of the Renegade G5. The best SSD for running an operating system is probably the WD Black SN8100.
The Fury Renegade G5 performed well thanks to a few victories in the Explorer section of the 48GB transfer test. But in FastCopy, it wasn’t quite as quick as the others.
Regarding that, even if the findings could appear to be inaccurate, the performance difference between FastCopy and Windows Explorer is true. FastCopy has code from this decade, which Explorer should have. For big data transfer activities, grab it. For further information, see my comparison of Xcopy, FastCopy, and Windows Explorer.
Regarding sustained sequential writing, I was only able to slow down the Renegade G5 from 2.85GBps to between 1.8GBps and 2GBps after writing a 950GB VHD three times in a row in Explorer without stopping. That’s fine with me. The typical videographer can, too.
The Renegade G5 is basically as fast, or faster in most aspects, as the PCIe 5.0 DRAM competition. To benefit, of course, you need a PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot, which is currently not widely available. or an adaptor card like the Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 with a free PCIe 5.0 slot.
Conclusion
Yes, you ought to purchase it. Even though the typical user will never push any of the drives to their limit, the extremely generous TBW rating breaks what is essentially a performance tie in our opinion. It’s still a Kingston winner.
