Introduction

Launched in 2014, KLEVV is a brand that specializes in memory products, both DRAM and NAND. The brand is owned by Essencore, who are part of the SK Group (SK C&C), KLEVV benefits from strong ties to SK Hynix, one of the world's largest and most respected DRAM manufacturers. The brand name "KLEVV" was chosen to suggest a clever, technically advanced choice for consumers.



Today we are testing the KLEVV CRAS C930, a midrange M.2 NVMe SSD that's selling at competitive pricing. Internally, the Innogrit IG5236 controller is used, which has been on the market for quite some time now. It was first launched around 2021 and has been used on drives like the Acer Predator GM7000, HP FX900 Pro, Lexar NM800, Silicon Power X70 and XPG Gammix S70 Blade. The NAND flash is Hynix's modern 176-layer 3D TLC NAND.

The KLEVV CRAS C930 is available in capacities of 1 TB ($76) and 2 TB ($120). Endurance for these models is set to 750 TBW and 1500 TBW, respectively. KLEVV offers a five-year warranty with the C930.

Packaging

The Drive

The drive is designed for the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


PCI-Express 4.0 x4 is used as the host interface to the rest of the system.


On the PCB you'll find the controller and just one flash chip, a DRAM cache chip is included, too.


Bundled in the package is a small aluminium heatsink. It's attached using adhesive thermal tape—no clamp mechanism or screws like on other drives.


The heatsink looks good and seems to be of high quality.

Chip Component Analysis

The Innogrit IG5236 is the company's first controller to support PCI-Express 4.0. It uses eight channels to maximize transfer rates and is fabricated on a 12 nm process at TSMC Taiwan.


The two flash chips are Hynix 176-layer 3D TLC NAND. They have been rebranded by Essencore. Each chip has a capacity of 1 TB.


One Nanya LPDDR4-4266 chip provides 2 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.

Test Setup

Synthetic Testing

• Tests are run with a 20-second-long warm-up time (result recording starts at second 21).
• Between each test, the drive is left idle for 60 seconds, to allow it to flush and reorganize its internal data.
• All write requests contain random, incompressible data.
• Disk cache is flushed between all tests.
• During these tests, M.2 drives are tested with additional active fan-cooling, to ensure thermal throttling can't happen

Real-life Testing

• After initial configuration and installation, a disk image is created; it is used to test every drive.
• Automated updates are disabled for the OS and all programs. This ensures that—for every review—each drive uses the same settings, without interference from previous testing.
• Our disk image consumes around 700 GB—partitions are resized to fill all available space on the drive.
• All drives are filled with random data to 85% of their capacity. This is intentional, to run the drive in realistic operating conditions—nobody uses a nearly-empty SSD in their system. It also puts additional stress on the pseudo-SLC cache subsystem, because there is less free NAND space to work with.
• Partitions are aligned properly.
• Disk cache is flushed between all tests.
• In order to minimize random variation, each real-life performance test is run several times, with reboots between tests to minimize the impact of disk cache.
• All application benchmarks run the actual application and do not replay any disk traces.
• Our real-life testing data includes performance numbers for a typical high-performance HDD, using results from a Western Digital WD Black 1 TB 7200 RPM 3.5" SATA. HDDs are significantly slower than SSDs, which is why we're not putting the result in the chart, as that would break the scaling, making the SSDs indistinguishable in comparison. Instead, we've added the HDD performance numbers in the title of each test entry.
• During these tests, M.2 drives are tested with additional active fan-cooling, to ensure thermal throttling can't happen