ASUS ROG “RAIDR Express” PCIe SSD Officially Launched

We’ve seen the ASUS RAIDR Express SSD as long ago as CES 2013 but it is now finally ready for a consumer release. ASUS’ RAIDR Express has taken so long to get to market because ASUS have had to work really hard on trying to develop a PCIe SSD that is compatible with the widest variety of motherboards. The ASUS RAIDR Express comes with “DuoMode” which allows it to work with both a legacy BIOS and a modern UEFI BIOS. The DuoMode is changed by a hardware level switch.

The RAIDR Express has a 240GB capacity with sequential reads of 830 MB/s and writes of 810 MB/s. IOPS are up to 100K for 4K read/write performance. The flash used is 19nm Toshiba MLC sync-NAND chips. Additionally ASUS have also bundled a RAMDisk utility with the RAIDR Express to allow up to 12,000 MB/s and reduce the number of write cycles on the RAIDR Express SSD thus extending its life span.

ASUS have developed ROG HybriDisk technology which allows the RAIDR Express to be an SSD Cache for a traditional hard drive up to 4TB in capacity. The ASUS RAIDR Express has TRIM support and a MTBF of 620,000 hours.

Specification

• PCI Express 2.0 x2
• 240 GB capacity
• Dual LSI SandForce SF-2281 controllers
• Toshiba 19 nm 16K page size MLC Sync-NAND Flash
• Sequential read/write speed: 830/810 MB/s
• Up to 100,000 4K read/write IOPS (Input/Output operations Per Second)
• Legacy and UEFI BIOS support
• Driver-free with TRIM support
• Windows 7 / Windows 8 compatible
• Windows 8 Secure Boot compatible
• 157 x 120 x 20 mm