Asus has announced the ROG RAIDR Express, the first PCI-Express SSD to offer DuoMode BIOS support that includes two BIOS chips and a hardware switch that allows it to be compatible with both legacy and modern UEFI BIOS.The SSD features a dual LSI SandForce controller, Toshiba 19 mm 16K MLC NAND flash memory that provides a capacity of 240 GB, sequential read and write speeds of 830 MB/s and 810 MB/s, respectively, and is rated for 100,000 4K read/write IOPS.
The ROG RAIDR also bundles a number of other “speed-boosting tricks up its sleeve” including RAMDisk, ROG HydriDisk technology, and the SSD TweakIt utility. The former allows users to dedicate up to 80 percent of a computer’s available RAM for use as a high-speed virtual drive to accelerate the loading of favorite applications and games. It has achieved read speeds of over 12,000 MB/s in Asus’ internal tests.
The ROG HydriDisk allows the SSD to act as a solid state cache for mechanical hard drives with a capacity of up to 4 TB. TweakIt can relocate repetitive write tasks to the RAMDisk for faster operations and can be used to apply a preset profile “that refines processor settings automatically.”
Last but not least, Asus has placed particular emphasis that the ROG RAIDR’s impressive performance has not come at the expense of durability since the SSD is rated for a remarkable 620,000 hours mean time between failure (MTBF) and includes tough, double-sided metal shielding for better heat dissipation, stability and reduced electromagnetic interference.
Asus has yet to disclose information on the ROG RAIDR’s pricing or availability.
