Asus is set to enter the high performance SSD market

pcgamer.com:

Asus is set to release a high performance SSD according to a teaser the company posted on its Taiwanese Facebook page. The drive is yet to officially launch, but with Asus set to hold its ‘Boundless’ ROG event on the 17th of May, along with a scaled down Computex, we’ll surely be getting more details about this drive soon.

According to the lone picture, (via Tom's Hardware) the ROG Strix SQ7 is a standard form factor 2280 PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe SSD. It comes with an aluminium or perhaps graphene cooling strip. That would suit users who plan to use it underneath a motherboard heatsink. There’s no indication if there will be a heatsink equipped version, though a PS5 compatible version is surely likely.

An Asus ROG branded drive is not unexpected. These days it’s relatively easy for a manufacturer to release a drive with off the shelf components. Competitors including MSI and Gigabyte have their own Phison E18 drives that offer read and write speeds of 7GB/s or more. These compete very well with fully in house designed drives from Samsung and Western Digital.

The high performance SSD market is rather saturated. SSDs are not exactly commodity items but these days there’s not a lot to choose between them once you move beyond aesthetics and price. Asus will benefit from its well-known brand name but it won’t be able to charge much of a price premium if it’s to compete with established storage manufacturers including those mentioned above, but also companies like Kingston and Seagate.

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The move to produce SSDs means that Asus