New Solid State Drives Approaching Top Speed

New Kingston Raw Pawns are getting close to the limit of what they can do with PCIe 4.0.

This week, Kingston pulled the plug on two of its fastest solid-state drives ever: the KC3000 and the Fury Renegade. Both tags reported transfer speeds of 7000MB/s — or more.

These speeds require their own bandwidth, and therefore we are talking here of course about NVMe PCIe 4.0-based SSDs. Even with this fast data bus, these speeds weren’t normal, but now both better controllers and better memory have found their way to the market.

Confused? See our glossary at the bottom of the issue.

The fastest SSDs we’ve tested so far were around 7000MB/s for reading and 5000MB/s for writing. With the new generation of SSDs, it’s basically the writing speed that gets a boost.

The fact that the reading speed does not increase in turn is due to the fact that one has reached, so to speak, the maximum that is possible with four PCIe 4.0 lanes, where the theoretical maximum transfer speed is 7877 MB / s.

In fact, the development was rather fast. Especially considering that the fastest SSDs are arguably a niche product to date, even though AMD got this in place for PCIe 4.0 with the Ryzen 3000 series two years ago.

But in hindsight, Intel also came up with processors that support this, and the PlayStation 5 also uses it, so there are more and more PCs that can use ultra-fast memory sticks like the Kingston ones here.

The two new models from Kingston have nearly identical specifications. Both come in capacities from 500MB to 4GB and are normally only available in M. 2 format – so they will usually be installed directly on the motherboard.

From what we can understand, there are no physical differences between the two SSDs, as long as we ignore the heatsink design. The fact that the two models have different characteristics is due to the fact that the controller is programmed to give them that.

7000 MB/sec	7300 MB/sec
7000 MB/sec	7000 MB/sec
Million (read/write)	Million (read/write)
Which ends in E18	Which ends in E18
176 TLC Puzzles	176 TLC Puzzles
400 TB	500 TB
800 TB	1000 TB
1600 TB	2000 TB
3200 TB	4000 TB
1.8 million hours	1.8 million hours
5 years	5 years

According to the Kingston website is KC3000 Men’s “High-Performance Storage for Desktops and Laptops” for Men renegade rage It is aimed at “gaming enthusiasts and high-potential users”.

To us, it appears to be primarily a marketing ploy. First, the focus of sales is on usage, and the other is on the users themselves.

In the above table, we have listed some of the most important features. We should also mention that write speed does not apply to all capacities, first with the 2TB models we get full credit.

We note that the Fury Renegade is run to be a bit faster and is said to hold more with a higher TBW number. TBW stands for Total written bytes And it says something about how much the disk has to hold when writing to it.

For the two new Kingston models, this number is relatively high and in this sense appears to be fast and powerful than the SSDs we are dealing with.

Variants of one terabyte or more have such fast write speeds that they could be able to do the job as additional PlayStation 5 storage.

When it comes to choosing between the KC3000 and the Fury Renegade, we imagine it wouldn’t be much of a difference in practical use, but we’re still told that the Fury Renegade will be a bit more expensive. This may have been a factor explaining why they performed poorly.

Strictly speaking, we should not pretend that this is a stupid strategy. Western Digital does just that with its WD Black SN850, which also topped our SSD assembly test our spring.

Kingston isn’t the only manufacturer releasing new SSD drives these days. Teamgroup has at least revealed the T-Force Cardea A440 Pro, which will have speeds of 7400MB/s read and 7000MB/s write.

Current abbreviations

sataSerial ATA is a technology and physical interface standard with its own connector and power plug. In the past two decades, hard drives and optical drives for regular computers have primarily used SATA to communicate with the motherboard.

SATA speed increased until around 2010, and has remained stable ever since. The current standard is SATA 6 Gb / s or SATA III.

PCIePCI Express (PCIe) is the same data bus standard used between the graphics card and the motherboard. Modern PCIe has much more bandwidth than SATA 6Gb/s, which is one of the reasons this interface has been gaining ground for faster SSDs.

On paper, PCIe 4.0 is twice as fast as PCIe 3.0, and average SSD manufacturers have seen it take advantage of that. The M. 2 SSD is limited to four PCIe “lanes”, which together with PCI 3.0 means a theoretical maximum transfer speed of 3,938 MB/s. With PCIe 4th generation, this doubles to 7,877 MB/s.

m 2: A physical standard for internal supplementary cards. The standard allows cards of different sizes, in terms of length, width, and somewhat height. M. 2 SSDs are usually 2280 or 2260 in size, which means 22 mm wide and 80 and 60 mm long respectively – but they can also be shorter or longer.

The M. 2 SSD can use either PCIe or SATA interface.

NVMe: A lot of current disk technologies come with drivers and specifications from the “old days”, when rotating disks and SATA were the norm. NVMe or NVM Express (the letters NVM come from non-volatile memory) are simply a disk specification designed specifically for solid state drives connected via PCI Express.