Introduction

With revenue in the multi-billion dollars range, Kingston is the largest DRAM and flash memory products vendor in the world. While their strongest suit is memory modules and USB/flash card storage, they are also a major player in the SSD market, having released famous products such as the KC3000 and NV2/NV3.

The Kingston Fury Renegade G5 is a high-performance PCIe 5.0 SSD aimed at users requiring fast storage. It finally brings Kingston’s offerings to the Gen 5 world. The drive uses the Silicon Motion SM2508 controller, designed for efficiency and reduced thermal output, which helps with cooling requirements. We’ve seen the controller before on the Acer Predator GM9000, and several other drives using the SM2508 have been announced recently.

Unlike the GM9000 and some other competing models, the Fury Renegade G5 is built with Kioxia 218-layer BiCS8 TLC NAND flash instead of Micron’s B58R. This difference in NAND sourcing may lead to variations in performance or endurance characteristics, which makes this review interesting. Kingston also includes a DRAM cache of 2 GB of LPDDR4 memory, used to manage the SSD’s internal data structures.

The Kingston Fury Renegade G5 is available in capacities of 1 TB ($200), 2 TB ($325) and 4 TB ($590). The endurance is set to 1000 TBW, 2000 TBW and 4000 TBW respectively. Kingston includes a five-year warranty with the G5 SSD.