First BIOS agnostic PCI-E based solid state drive

It doesn’t matter if you own a motherboard with a legacy BIOS or one sporting a newfangled UEFI BIOS, the RAIDR Express from Asus ROG will play nice either way. It’s a PCI-E based solid state drive (SSD), and supposedly the first of its kind with a DuoMode feature that allows it to work with either type of BIOS. Just flip the hardware switch to the appropriate setting and you’ll be off an running with a spectacularly fast SSD.

How fast? According to Asus, the RAIDR Express can perform sequential reads at up to 830MB/s and sequential writes at up to 810MB/s, along with 100,000 4K read/write IOPS. The drive uses the latest generation dual LSI SandForce controller and Toshiba-made 19nm 16k-page size multi-level cell (MLC) sync-NAND flash memory chips.

You can run the RAIDR Express as a standalone drive or configure it to act as a solid state cache for high-capacity hard drives up to 4TB via ROG HybriDisk technology.

It’s a 240GB capacity drive with a double-sided metal shielding. Asus rates the MTBF (mean time before failure) at 620,000 hours, which is more than 70 years!

No word yet on price or availability.

Republished from Maximum PC. (View original version.)