First seen at CES 2013 exhibition, Asus ROG RAIDR solid-state drives are on their final stage of development before an official release in May. Unlike the majority of contemporary SSD solutions in the market, the product from Asus features quite distinct form-factor, similar to expansion cards. The new drive is known to employ PCI Express 2.0 x2 interface with the support of x16/x8/x4 slots.



According to the preliminary data, ROG RAIDR solid-state drives will be available in two capacity variations – 120 GB and 240 GB. Both models will run under a couple of SandForce SF2281 controllers, comprised into RAID 0 array. MLC NAND flash-memory chips from Toshiba (designed under 19 nm technological process) will be the heart of revolutionary SSDs. Irrespective of the overall differentiation, ROG RAIDR will support a range of technologies traditional SSDs support, including S.M.A.R.T., TRIM and NCQ.


With the respect to the performance, both drives will be able to demonstrate …

The previous generation of LGA1151 motherboards from ASUS numbered several «gaming» models, which stood out among others with the designation Pro Gaming. Now, with the advent of new chipsets from Intel, the company's specialists decided to allocate such products to a separate segment, assigning them the name ROG Strix.


The main bias of these models is not based on overclocking capabilities, but on the hard- and software component related to the increased requirements of users to create the necessary atmosphere when working with a PC. So, on the background of conventional boards, the difference will be in the audio and network nodes. The brand RGB-backlighting AURA is realized here to the full extent as well.


Main Characteristics

Chipset: Intel H270

Processor socket: Socket 1151

Processors: Core i7, Core i5, Core i3, Pentium, Celeron (Skylake-S, Kaby Lake-S)

Memory: 4 DIMM DDR4 SDRAM 2133/2400, a maximum of 64 GB

PCI-E slots: 1 x PCI Express 3.0 x16

1 x …

Right after the announcement of HighPoint about the release of its new RAID-controllers series, the company highlighted some specifications of the upcoming model, codenamed RocketRaid 4520. This controller is based on Marvell Sheeva 88RC9580 processor with ARM core which operates at 900 MHz frequency. The model is notable for the availability of 512 Mb of DDR3 memory type. According to the words of the manufacturer, this RAID-controller is primarily targeted at server systems of average and high level.



RocketRaid 4520 is equipped with eight ports for the connection of drives with SATA and SAS interfaces, along with mini-SAS (6 Gb/sec bandwidth). It employs PCI Express 2.0 x8 interface and supports RAID0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, JBOD configurations. The availability of a dedicated port companders empowers the enlargement of hard drives number up to 128 items.


In addition, RocketRaid 4520 is able to support advanced RAID options, such as P+Q+Copy, Dual XOR RAID 6, Q+Q+Q Raid 6. …