Kingston Fury Renegade G5 8TB

PCIe 5.0 drives in 8TB and 16TB capacities have been rare outside a few markets. As I live in Europe and have a serious video gaming addiction, I genuinely need large drives, as my motherboard only supports a few. In reality, I could make do with a third or fourth generation NVMe drive, but they simply don't come in the capacities I need.

Kingston's Fury Renegade G5 series functions, like many other drives, without a heatsink, instead using a conductive material on top that looks like a sticker. Since most motherboards don't offer much flexibility, and standard heatsinks rarely fit well with drives that have their own, I've come to strongly prefer drives designed like this. So, plus points to Kingston.

It uses a standard configuration of 1GB of DDR4 memory as cache per 1TB of storage, along with the SM2508 controller, known for its efficiency, which is crucial when every 0.1 watts of power draw counts. For comparison, the maximum power draw is 9.5W, while most competitors pull 12-14W. While it rarely uses that much power, it's still an impressive display of thermal efficiency. More importantly, it doesn't require active cooling, which some controllers do. The drive ran between 48-53°C under load, which is perfectly fine: low temperatures aren't ideal for NVMe drives, and very high ones can cause damage. Even maxing out at 65°C in short bursts is well within safe limits and this was tested in a computer configured for silent operation, not on our high-airflow test bench.

This is also why the test results baffle me slightly. The controller was released last year, so perhaps it needs a firmware update, because I didn't reach the promised speeds. While write speeds were very close at 13,612 MB/s with cache, compared to the rated 14,000 MB/s read speeds that weren't anywhere near the promised 14,800 MB/s, hitting a wall at 12,283 MB/s. It may seem minor at these speeds, but I've become used to most drives staying within 1% of their rated maximums, and often exceeding them. A 17% shortfall is too much, and that's with cache enabled. Always keep in mind that for very large file transfers, once your DRAM cache (8GB in this case) is used up, performance will drop further.

The memory is TLC NAND, placed on a 12-layer PCB. As more modules are stacked, the weight reaches a hefty 9.2g which is quite a lot for an NVMe drive. It does, however, make it feel much less brittle and fragile than most NVMe drives.

What's far more interesting for consumers is the MTBF rating. Like its smaller siblings, Kingston's newer NVMe generations are extremely durable, with an expected lifetime of around 228 years. In other words, these drives should operate for two million hours on average before failure. Younger readers who've only known SSD-based storage may not realise it, but in the old days of mechanical hard drives, anything older than three years was living on borrowed time due to wear and tear.

With increased capacity also comes increased endurance. It's typically rated at 1PB of writes per terabyte of storage, meaning this 8TB model is rated for 8PB of data writes. I don't care how much 4K video you handle daily, 8PB is an insane amount of data. That's roughly 176,000 4K movies or 40,000 modern AAA games in practical terms. It's almost enough to store every single lie ever told by marketing and advertising companies in the last 50 years.

Price is always an issue though. While a few fifth generation drives start around €90 per TB, most sell for €140-160 per TB, which is why this drive's €936 price tag or €117 per TB, actually is not too bad. Expensive, yes, but reasonable for the capacity and speed.

You could go slightly cheaper by buying 2×4TB 11,800 MB/s drives, but you'd sacrifice speed and take up two NVMe slots. If you want the fastest single-drive solution, you'll pay for it.
Given that the performance shortfall could likely be fixed through a firmware or driver update, the negatives are very limited. The thermal handling , which I find just as important as raw performance, is outstanding, and the pricing is more than fair. It could be a little cheaper, sure, but given how much 14,800 MB/s drives usually cost that might be pushing our luck with such a well-known brand.