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.
Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD
Best gaming motherboard: The right boards
Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits
Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the rest
The move to produce SSDs means that Asus manufactures everything a gamer needs for a complete system apart from CPUs and memory. Asus peripherals, monitors, cases, and power supplies are all available, along with Asus’s more traditional motherboards and graphics cards.
Asus has some experience with memory, including helping G.Skill design the it’s double DIMM modules back in 2018. Is it only a matter of time before Asus develops its own RAM? I can imagine its in house overclockers having a lot of fun pushing DDR5 speeds to well over 10000MHz.
The pictured SQ7 SSD has a 1TB capacity. That means it won’t cost all that much. There’s no word on availability, the release of other capacities or exact pricing, but we can expect to hear more at the Boundless event next week.
If you don't want to wait for Asus' SSDs, check out our Best Gaming SSD guide. Faster storage with greater capacity is always welcome.
