Performance Storage Subsystem - Serial Express

Performance Storage Subsystem - Serial Express

With the ASUS Z97-A and Z97 Deluxe motherboards ASUS is pursuing an experimental storage slot. SATA express. ASUS will offer a SSD that has two M2 modules setup in RAID 0 inside the SSD, dubbed Hyper express.  

In order to deliver the full potential of SATA Express, the host motherboard must contain the SRIS architecture in the BIOS. It ensures that the crucial timings between the high-speed SATA Express device and the motherboard are kept precisely in tune. Users of future ASUS motherboards will enjoy sequential read/write speeds of up to 700 to even 800 MB/s.

This is not yet the final product since it is still a prototype. We received a prototype device that is using two Kingston 120GB mSATA SSDs tied to a ASMedia ASM1062R controller that comes with RAID support.
 

As you can see from the AS SSD screen-shot above, the drive was able to reach 667 MB/s sequential read and 431 MB/s sequential write. So yeah, we have an issue to tackle as the results disappointed a little bit. Still, keyword here is prototype as this is very new technology.

Also the performance is already definitely faster than your typical SSD, and could be comparable to a PCIe based SSDs already. I find PCIe M.2. based solutions to be more interesting as they don't really need RAID0 and complex connectors. Let's have a peek at that on the next page.