14 DAY TRIAL // Through a collaboration with Kingston, ASUS has created its first solid-state drive ever, and it's not just any solid-state drive.
You'd think that the company would start with the basics, but that's not what happened. Instead, ASUS jumped right at the latest feature, namely the SATA Express interface.
SATA Express, set to be released this May (next month as it were), is a computer bus that supports both Serial ATA (SATA) and PCI Express (PCIe) storage devices.
It is compatible with SATA, but provides multiple PCI Express lanes as a pure PCI Express connection to the storage device as well.
This approach was chosen because it was decided that doubling the speed of SATA as was done in the past would take too much time.
So, depending on how the drives are designed and how many PCI Express lanes are used, final drive speed could be of 1,969 MB/s.
The new HyperExpress drive from ASUS is actually a RAID 0 array made of two mSATA storage devices packed up in a 2.5-inch case. The sequential transfer rate reaches 778 MB/s.
Future models might use two M.2 SSDs instead of mSATA though, enabling better performance and capacity. Speaking of which, the storage space hasn't been decided upon yet.
