Technology & Positioning
The Klevv CRAS C925 is the company's newest high performance value-oriented solid-state drive. It uses the famous MaxioTech MAP1602 controller, also used on other popular drives like the Lexar NM790. While virtually all the MAP1602 drives use NAND flash from YMTC, Klevv has opted for SK Hynix TLC NAND instead. The reason for this seems to be that their parent company, Essencore, is part of the SK Group, which has SK Hynix as its most prominent member. Having powerful allies doesn't only help with pricing, but also with access to engineering resources, knowledge and validation methods/data. Part of what makes testing in this review interesting is that it gives us insights into how YMTC vs Hynix TLC performs in an apples-to-apples comparison using the same controller. As expected for a value drive, there is no DRAM cache, but the controller will use up to 64 MB of the system's memory for the mapping tables.

Synthetic Performance
Synthetic performance results of the Klevv C925 end up roughly in the upper third of our test group, as expected for a MAP1602 TLC drive. Compared to YMTC NAND, sequential transfers are very similar. Random Write is a bit better with Hynix NAND, but YMTC makes up for that in the 50%/50% Random Mixed scenario. In sequential reads we got up to 7.1 GB/s and writes topped out at 6.4 GB/s. With a more realistic queue depth you're still getting almost 5 GB/s, which is pretty fast, too.

Real-Life Performance
Controller vendors have been optimizing their controllers for typical synthetic reviewer workloads on an empty drive. That's why it's important to also include real-life testing. We're even running those tests with the drives filled to 85% capacity, not empty. This approach puts additional strain on the various algorithms and the SLC cache, just like in real-life. Here the Klevv CRAS C925 wins big—just like the other MAP1602 drives. I'm always impressed by the performance numbers delivered by this relative newcomer to the controller market, beating top dogs like Phison and others. The C925 sits right at the top of our test results, achieving pretty much the same performance as Samsung 990 Pro, Crucial T500 and Solidigm P44 Pro. The PCIe Gen 5 Corsair MP700 Pro is 4% faster, which isn't a lot, especially considering the drawbacks in terms of power, heat and cost. Compared to other value drives like the Kingston NV3, the performance uplift is almost 10%, the older Kingston NV2 is even 20% slower. I think it's also important here to highlight that "DRAM-less" is not the same across the board. It very much depends on the controller and how it handles that configuration. The MAP1602 is one of the best-optimized controllers for DRAM-less operation, when using it, you'll never notice that it's DRAM-less.

SLC Cache / Sustained Performance
The Klevv CRAS C925 uses an SLC cache size of 290 GB (or 42% in SLC mode), the drive can absorb nearly all bursts of write activity. Once the SLC cache is exhausted, transfer rates drop a bit, but still reach around 2000 MB/s, which is very impressive for a DRAM-less value-drive and much better than most of the competition, which reaches 500 MB/s in that state. Once the drive is almost completely full we do see some drops to 600 MB/s. Nevertheless, filling the whole 2 TB capacity completed at 1319 MB/s, an excellent result that's roughly twice as high as competing drives. Only high-end SSDs with DRAM and eight NAND channels achieve significantly better rates.

Power Consumption / Heat
MAP1602 is a very energy efficient design. Our testing shows that the SSD variant with Hynix has a slightly different power usage profile compared to MAP1602 with YMTC. In idle, the Hynix-based C925 uses a little bit less power, whereas under load, the YMTC-based SSDs have a small advantage. Overall, energy efficiency is very good and better than most competing drives. Klevv includes a very basic heat spreader in their package, which is nice, and we can confirm that it helps bring down temperatures a bit. Still, after a minute in our thermal stress test we saw thermal throttling, which was very well-behaved. To me, it looks like Klevv was very cautious with the thermal limits, a higher temperature limit would have helped with throttling. The thermal tape on the heat spreader is also a little bit thick, which hinders thermal transfer, too. Power users should probably still install a bigger full-metal heatsink, to avoid throttling during heavy loads. For the vast majority of light consumer scenarios, including gaming, this shouldn't be a problem though.

Pricing & Alternatives
The Klevv CRAS C925 2 TB is currently listed online for $108, which makes it one of the most affordable M.2 NVMe Gen 4 drives on the market. At that price point it offers fantastic price/performance that's hard to beat. No doubt, just a year ago SSD prices were much lower, with 2 TB drives reaching $100, but times have changed and prices have gone up considerably. We recently tested a bunch of value drives, but this one is the best so far. You get performance on par with the best high-end Gen 4 SSDs at a highly attractive price point. Noteworthy competitors are other MAP1602-based designs using YMTC NAND flash. These are basically identical, so pick depending on pricing and availability. What's also worth considering is the WD SN580 ($100) and WD SN770 ($120), which are both slightly slower but come from one of the biggest brands on the market. The recently released Kingston NV3 with QLC has been coming down in price steadily, and is $125 at the moment, still too much. Maybe once it goes under $100 it could become an alternative to the Klevv CRAS C925.