ASUS Is Entering The High End SSD Game With A 1TB PCIe 4 ROG Strix Screamer Coming
ASUS has its hands in a lot of cookie jars, including everything from smartphones and laptops, to motherboards, power supplies, graphics cards, a sea of gaming peripherals, and more. What you won't find among its extensive catalog of products, though, are any solid state drive (SSD) solutions. That's about to change.
Over on Facebook, the Republic of Gamers (ROG) division of ASUS is teasing an upcoming ROG Strix SQ7 SSD that promises to be screaming fast. Details are few and far between at the moment, but looking at the picture ASUS splashed on social media, this will be an M.2 form factor drive with a NVMe interface. It's also slated to deliver at least 1TB of storage capacity at PCIe Gen 4 speeds.
The first batch of enthusiast grade PCIe 4 SSDs delivered read and write speeds in the neighborhood of 5,000MB/s at the top end. Later on saw the launch of 7,000MB/s SSDs, and the absolute fastest PCIe 4 SSDs go even further, pushing data rates of around 7,400MB/s and higher. There aren't a ton of models that go quite that fast, but there are at least a handful.
It will be interesting to see where the ROG Strix SQ1 lands in the mix. Speculation is that it will employ a Phison PS5018-E18 controller paired with Micron 176-layer triple level cell (TLC) NAND flash memory chips. That's the same controller hardware that contributes to making Kingston's KC3000 such a speed demon, along with other competing SSDs like Corsair's MP600 Pro XT and Gigabyte's Aorus Gen4.
The other plausible candidate is Innogrit and its IG5236 controller. That's the same one as found on Adata's XPG Gammix S70 Blade, which is rated to deliver up to 7,400MB/s of sequential read performance and up to 6,800MB/s of sequential writes.
It also looks like the ROG Strix SQ7 should fit inside a PlayStation 5 console without issue, barring a chunky heatsink that's not shown in the teaser render. We should find out soon enough—the ROG Strix SQ7 will undoubtedly be formally unveiled during the upcoming ASUS Boundless event on May 17.
