Technology & Positioning
The KLEVV CRAS C930 is a value-offering that's designed to offer a "good enough" solid-state-drive at an affordable price point. It is built using the Innogrit IG5236 controller with 176-layer 3D TLC NAND from Hynix. While the hardware combination is certainly somewhat dated (controller from 2021 and NAND from 2022), this is a battle-tested combo that is used on a lot of SSDs in the market. Unlike many other value drives, the CRAS C930 comes with a DRAM cache chip, which is a strong selling point for those people who swear that only an SSD with dedicated DRAM chip is good enough for them, more on that later.

Synthetic Performance
Synthetic performance results of the KLEVV CRAS C930 sit roughly in the middle of our test group. Noteworthy are the random and sequential read performance results at QD1. Almost all consumer applications today, including games, operate at low queue depth—they don't parallelize data accesses. That's why QD1 is so important, and that's also why modern PCIe Gen 5 SSDs are less impressive than expected in real-life—because they improve QD1 performance only marginally, despite huge increases in sequential transfer rates.

Real-life Performance
Performance results in our real-life testing are pretty decent. While the drive can't compete with the best Gen 4 drives out there it's "close enough." Compared to modern options like the WD SN7100 or the various MAP1602 drives (Lexar NM790), the performance difference is 8 to 10%. That means the C930 is comparable to the Samsung 980 Pro, slightly slower than WD SN850 and SN770—not bad at all.

As mentioned before, unlike many competing drives in this price range, the C930 does have a dedicated DRAM cache chip, which stores the mapping tables of the SSD (where is the data?). However, modern DRAM-less drives will outperform the C930 in most workloads, because they are highly optimized for that task—our performance results confirm that.

SLC Cache
Klevv's drive comes with an SLC cache size of 94%, or 641 GB, which means it will fill nearly the whole capacity in SLC mode first, which lets it absorb even the biggest bursts of write activity. Once the cache is full, the drive will move data from SLC into TLC in the background, when it's sitting idle, or when it needs more space for incoming data. Filling the drive's whole 2 TB capacity completed at 1.8 GB/s, which is a very good result for this price range, and better than all DRAM-less SSDs. The DRAM-less MAP1602-based drives get around 1.4 GB/s, which is pretty close, but if you plan on writing a lot of data, then the C930 is a good choice.

Thermals & Energy Efficiency
Thermal performance of the Klevv C930 is not that impressive. Due to the older hardware components, the energy efficiency isn't high, which means heat output is increased, too. Klevv includes a small heatsink in the package—which is definitely not the norm in this price range. While the drive will certainly work fine without heatsink, especially with light "family computer"-type workloads, power users should definitely consider installing the heatsink. Even with the heatsink we saw some thermal throttling in our thermal stress test that not even a very big Thermalright aftermarket heatsink could fix. The heat output from the drive is simply too high when under full load for long times. Other, more modern alternatives do much better here, almost doubling the energy efficiency.

Do note that the actual temperatures of the controller and heatsink were fairly low in our testing—not even 80°C. It seems that the thermal throttle limit is set very low on the drive. Had they allowed higher temps, could much of the throttling have been avoided?

Pricing & Alternatives
The KLEVV CRAS C930 2 TB is currently listed online for $120, which is a pretty good price for a 2 TB TLC SSD that offers decent performance. The included DRAM cache is certainly a selling point for specific workloads. Very strong competition comes from the various MAP1602 drives like the Lexar NM790 ($140), WD's new SN7100 ($140), the SN770 ($120) and of course the SN580 ($115). Some of these options offer a bit higher performance at similar pricing, with lower heat output, but they lack a dedicated DRAM cache. If only KLEVV offered a 4 TB model, it would make a great storage drive.