ASUS Launches RAIDR Express 240GB PCIe Solid State Drive

Updated: July 31, 2013

With the SSD market exploding, it’s not at all surprising to see new hardware all the time in this segment. ASUS throws its latest offering into the pile with its RAIDR Express 240GB drive that slaps right into an existing PCI-express 2.0 slot. Branded under the Republic of Gamers moniker, this drive looks to be a real speed demon.

This is a good way around the bandwidth limitations of SATA but does come at the “cost” of using up a PCI-e slot, something not everyone can do. That said, however, ASUS expects this drive to sell very well and we’re sure it will as well.

Clearly, its branding of “RAIDR” carries with it the implication of a RAID setup and that’s exactly what you get here. Two drives in a RAID-0 configuration, which ASUS claims delivers read speeds up to 830 megabytes per second and write speeds at 810 megabytes per second, harness two SandForce controllers with a 19-nanometer Toshiba MLC NAND. Top that off with a rating of 100,000 IOPS and 4k random access for reads/writes and you have the making for a very formidable SSD setup.

Taking into consideration reliability concerns, ASUS has incorporated TRIM technology so there should be little to no performance degradation over time. ASUS also uses a physical DuoMode – a swith that lets SSD work flawlessly with BIOS-driving motherboards as well as the new UEFI boards – either way, you’re covered. As of press time, ASUS hasn’t released pricing or availability yet, however, we expect to see it before school starts.

Source: Tech Spot

Robert Loyd

Form Factor “Nudge” – “PCI-Express (PCIe) solid state drive (SSD) for next-generation ultra-slim notebook PCs. ”
Which might be supported, not every laptop is going to be able to use it.
Robert Loyd

It would be nice to be able to afford either of these solutions. But at $649… I’ll wait. But with a SSD as a primary boot, either of these are great for media transcoding. For now I use one drive to read, transcode, and the write to a different drive. Thus it get’s done faster.
Robert Loyd

The use of dual SF-2281′s which are going to be cheap since they came out in 2011. The IOPS you will have to refer to the SF-2281′s performance spec’s which is easily enough to do a search on. The 800+ claimed read/writes are probably on considering the PCIe is used, and could be faster if a better controller set was used. So it’s merely repackaged 2011 technology. Even the MLC is probably just within spec, and might even be 2011 tech. But until someone can open up this solution and read and cross reference the numbers on the MLC chips. We’ll never know. Don’t get me wrong I wouldn’t mind one of these. But the price point vs technology will be interesting. Yes, it’s a pretty package also. So in the end I will not pay more than $150 for 2011 possibly 2012 technology, nor should anyone else. I am not drooling and would take a newer video card before this, which will provide me better FPS and game performance. $150 to $180 would make for a fair price range for this.