Asus will start the sales of the previously announced Raidr Express SSDs by half May. The SSDs part of the Republic of Gamers (ROG) series will become available in capacities of 120 and 240 GB. The SSD that fits in a PCIe 2.0 x2 slot should be able to achieve maximum read and write speeds of 830 MB/s and 810 MB/s.
The Raidr Express will use two SandForce SF-2281 conrrollers that are in hardware RAID 0 and control 19 nm MLC NAND flash from Toshiba. Thanks to this combination the SSDs should be able to achieve random reads and writes of 100,000 IOPS . The sequential read and write speeds of the 120 GB drive speed are specified at 775 MB/s for reading and 765 MB/s for writing. The 240 GB drive is a bit faster with specified read speeds of 830 MB/s and write speeds of 810 MB/s.
The Raidr Express SSDs support TRIM, Windows 8 Secure Boot and have support for hardware based 128bit AES data encryption. The drives ship with several applications that allow to tweak the drive and to use the Raidr Express as a cache drive. It appears Asus is also bundling it with a ROG branded version of CrystalDiskMark, software to bench the SSD.
So far it's unknown what the drives will cost, as stated before they should become available in May this year.
