YOU DO KNOW THE PS5018-E18 CONTROLLER THOUGH

The KLEVV CRAS C920 1TB NVMe SSD was for sale on Amazon for an impressively low $165, though for now it seems to have disappeared, though there is still some KLEVV CRAS DDR4 kits still floating around so presumably the company hasn’t disappeared.  The brand is certainly not one you would name if asked to list PCIe 4.0 SSDs, but the Phison PS5018-E18 is certainly familiar and their five year warranty is a good thing to see.  Along with 1024GB of “strictly selected 3D TLC NAND” it has a 1GB DDR cache, all of which is easy to see thanks to the decision not to include a heatspreader with the drive.

In ServeTheHome’s testing the KLEVV CRAS C920 performed somewhat comparably to the Gigabyte AORUS 7000s overall, with sequential reads between 5000-7000 MB/s and 5000 MB/s random write, apart from ATTO which did not seem to like this drive at all.  The speed of the drive is a little lower overall compared to other PCIe 4.0 drives, but then again so is the price making it somewhat attractive.

There are two caveats to this, the first being that ServeTheHome didn’t find an easy RMA process from KLEVV, which could lead to frustration if you end up having issues.  The second is that with great PCIe 3.0 drives being even less expensive, is it wise to shop on the lower end of PCIe 4.0 drives at this time?