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ASUS ROG (Republic Of Gamers) is announcing the RAIDR Epxress, a PCIe-based SSD that features support for both older (legacy) BIOS motherboards; as well as for modern UEFI BIOS boards. The RAIDR Express is targeted to serious gamers and PC power users who demand speed and durability from their systems. The red and black design, including two-sided metal shields, is consistent with other ROG-themed ASUS products.
The RAIDR Express features an onboard DuoMode switch, where users are able to select the legacy BIOS position, or the UEFI BIOS position (depending on motherboard). Of course one advantage of UEFI BIOS is significantly faster boot times. This DuoMode feature allows the RAIDR Express to be used with a wide spectrum of motherboards.
Featuring 240GB of capacity, the RAIDR Express attains sequential reads of 830 MB/s and writes of 810 MB/s. ASUS ROG rates the RAIDR Express at 620,000 hours mean time between failures (MTBF), which equates to incredible durability. Random 4K read/write IOPS are stated as 100,000. The RAIDR Express utilizes dual LSI SandForce controllers (latest generation) and 19nm Toshiba multi-level cell (MLC) synchronous NAND Flash.
The RAIDR Express is also bundled with a RAMDisk utility, allowing up to 80% of system RAM to be utilized as a high-speed virtual drive to accelerate game and application loading. Utilizing the RAMDisk feature, ASUS achieved reads of over 12,000 MB/s in testing. This also extends the PCIe SSD’s lifespan, as unnecessary write operations are significantly reduced.
ASUS has also included ROG HybriDrive technology into the RAIDR Express, allowing it to be used as a caching SSD in conjunction with HDDs of up to 4TB in capacity. Even as a caching drive, the RAIDR Express attains data transfers of over 600 MB/s.
Pricing and availabilty for the ASUS ROG RAIDR Express PCIe SSD have not yet been announced. The product page can be viewed at the ASUS ROG website here.