ASUS Entering The PCIe NVMe SSD Segment: Teases High-End PCIe Gen 4.0 ROG STRIX SQ7 Drive
Almost every major vendor is currently offerings its own PCIe SSD range with both value-oriented and high-end options. ASUS’s major rivals, Gigabyte and MSI, have been offering their solutions for some time now. MSI being the more recent entrant into the segment has its SPATIUM series while Gigabyte offers its SSDs under the AORUS branding. Based on the marketing, ASUS is likely going to utilize its ROG STRIX branding for the new PCIe NVMe SSDs. In fact, the marketing for the SSD gives us a lot of details that we can expect from the upcoming lineup. For starters, the series will be branded as the ROG STRIX SQ7 and it looks like there will be tiers ranging from SQ7, SQ5, and SQ3. The drive showcased comes in the standard M.2 2280 form factor. It is PCIe Gen 4x4 compliant and the copper film or sticker as you might call it, features the 1 TB capacity label. It is unknown if that’s the maximum capacity that will be offered on this variant but the competitors are offering much higher capacity models than this. Another thing that ASUS would keep in mind is that their competitors are already offering their SSD solutions with compatibility with Sony’s PlayStation 5. Having such compatibility from the get-go is going to be met with a positive response. Also, the competitors are offering their solutions with a heatsink solution too. So it looks like ASUS is waiting for the initial response and reviews for this PC SSD before they end up providing more higher-end solutions. Plus, we also have to remember that the PCIe NVMe Gen 4 SSD market is very saturated in almost every category so ASUS will have to be pretty good in the pricing department if they want to take it head-on with their brand new solution. Currently, there’s no word on when ASUS plans to launch their ROG STRIX Gen 4 NVMe SSDs but one can point to the coming ‘BOUNDLESS’ event which is planned for the 17th of May (9 PM TPE). This sounds like a pre-Computex event that ASUS has planned out and we can expect the SSDs & a lot more products to be announced there.
