For everyday installations, or to expand the hard drive of a laptop, we all want to be able to choose an SSD that is powerful enough to have a better experience when accessing data and creating entertainment. Recently, we experienced the KLEVV CRAS C910 (hereinafter referred to as KLEVV C910), which supports PCIe Gen4×4 and also comes with an aluminum heatsink.
Product Introduction
KLEVV is a consumer brand owned by semiconductor and memory products company ESSENCORE, which has been providing excellent memory products for gamers, content creators and computer enthusiasts for 10 years.
At last year's Computex Taipei, KLEVV showcased its top-of-the-line CRAS C950 PCIe 5.0 SSD, and also released a PCIe 4.0 SSD for mainstream gamers that is more suitable for ordinary consumers, which is the CRAS C910 that we will introduce today.
The appearance of the KLEVV C910 box is very simple, with a contrast of off-white tones on the front, and many important information can also be seen on the outer box. For example, M.2 2280 specification, 3D NAND flash memory, support for NVMe 1.4, SLC intelligent cache, etc.
It is worth mentioning that the KLEVV C910 comes with an aluminum heat sink in the box, which is officially claimed to reduce the temperature by up to 10%, which is very good! I also strongly recommend that you put this aluminum heatsink on the first thing you get when you get the C910, why do you say that?
First of all, because the heat of the SSD is still very terrible when it is read and written for a long time, and if the heat is not dissipated in time, it is likely that the reading and writing performance will decline, and in the long run, it may even affect the service life of the product. Secondly, the heat sink of KLEVV C910 is very thin, only 1mm thick, even if it is installed on a laptop or mini host, it can be easily used, and it will not have too high space requirements.
In terms of parameters, KLEVV C910 uses 3D TLC NAND flash memory, with HMB cache technology, and provides three versions of 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB, with a total data write of 350TBW, 700TBW, and 1400TBW respectively, and provides a 5-year limited warranty.
The KLEVV C910 in our hands is a 500GB version, the official sequential read speed is 5000MB/s, and the sequential write speed is 3700MB/s, so let's use the software to actually test the performance of this hard drive.
Product measurement
The test platform we used was an AMD Ryzen 5 7600X processor and an ASRock X670E Taichi motherboard. First of all, the basic information of KLEVV C910 is detected by CyrstalDiskInfo: PCIe 4.0×4 transfer mode, NVMe 1.4 standard, support S.M.A.R.T., TRIM and VolatileWriteCache, and the standby temperature is 28°C.
CrystalDiskMark tested its sequential read speed of 5262.9MB/s and sequential write speed of 4797.29MB/s.
This result is quite surprising to me, after all, KFiv officially advertises that the 500GB version is 5000MB/s and 3700MB/s sequential read/write, and the actual speed of the hard drive we tested far exceeds the official advertised value.
Next, we used ATTO Disk Bnechmark to test the sequential read and write performance and stability of files of different sizes, and it is not difficult to see that the KLEVV C910 is very stable and excellent, with a maximum sequential read speed of 4.48GB/s and a maximum write speed of 4.89GB/s.
In PCMark 10, we used the full system disk benchmark, which uses a range of everyday applications and software to test the performance of the drive when running programs in a more realistic scenario. The KLEVV C910 500GB version has a speed of 428.34MB/s, an average access time of 61μs, and a total score of 2713 points.
We also used the PCMark 10 data disk benchmark, which measures the read and write speed of the hard drive when storing files. The KLEVV C910 500GB version achieved a test result of 435.66MB/s, an average access time of 58μs, and an overall score of 2806.
For gaming, we used 3DMark for our storage benchmarks, and we saw an average speed of 358.77MB/s and an average access time of 85μs.
Loading speed is 746.46MB/s for Battlefield 5, 548.48MB/s for Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, 283.27MB/s for Overwatch, 183.10MB/s for installed games, and 2379.11MB/s for mobile games.
We also used the AJA System Test to simulate the writing and reading of professional-format video media files, setting up a 64GB size, 5120×2700 5K RED format media file, and the measured sequential write speed was 4429MB/s, and the read speed reached 4586MB/s.
Using the AIDA64 Disk Benchmark for the Linear Write test, we can see that when the write is about 33%, the hard disk speed drops from about 4400MB/s to about 1178MB/s. At around 40% write, the hard drive speed starts to drop to around 480MB/s. The average write speed of the hard drive reached 1776.2MB/s.
Finally, we also tested the temperature performance of KLEVV C910 in the CrystalDiskMark test, and we can see that the maximum temperature of the SSD reaches 77.6°C using the infrared thermometer.
Summary:
The KLEVV CRAS C910 has definitely exceeded expectations, with an aluminum heatsink that delivers more than expected performance, and has performed well in PCMark application tests, 3DMark gaming tests, and AJA System Tests. It's well worth getting it for as a PC or laptop expansion disk!