VR-Zone Chinese reviewed the Asus RAIDR EXPRESS ssd

[alanchankw]

VR-Zone Chinese release an review of the Asus ROG RAIDR EXPRESS pcie ssd.The ssd consist of LSI SandForce SF-2281 and Toshiba 19nm MLC. It is a pcie-4x card, and it could support application like RAMDISK or HybriDisk. Interesting it had a switch onboard, that could switch from supporting UEFI BIOS to legacy BIOS.  In the review they reported there is a ~10 seconds difference in boot time between UEFI BIOS and legacy BIOS.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

for the full review, please go to  http://chinese.vr-zone.com/62325/asus-pcie-ssd-rog-raidr-express-240gb-hand-on-review-05072013/ (in Chinese)

[silencerbob]

Great design, great specs, probably a great price(great meaning huge price).

[Lukiose]

But what's the price?

[Nicktrance]

Design is definitely nice although I do expect this to cost an arm and a leg and I'd probably prefer 2 SSDs in RAID 0 to keep my PC looking cleaner.

[lhikary]

forno thanks waitinf gor vertex 5 or samsung 850 pro

[lhikary]

forno thanks waitinf gor vertex 5 or samsung 850 pro

[dylandylandylan]

Goddamn Asus knows how to make sexy ass hardware.

[mgsstar]

This looks really sweet! Not sure why they would include an antivirus in the SSD...

[WhatARoaster]

Im sure this wont cost much more than £400

[Fonil]

Im sure this wont cost much more than £400

 

but its not going to be near the 1$/gb range. However if it launches under $300 its mine. 

[NannerBeans]

forno thanks waitinf gor vertex 5 or samsung 850 pro

Ocz stopped making making vertex. The new line is vector. The next one could be a vector 2 or even a different name. Don't know yet.

[fishymamba]

Pretty bad specs for a PCIe SSD. 

 

the RevoDrive 3 X2 had much higher specs:

 

1500 Mb/s read  

1225 Mb/s write
200,000 IOPS Random 4K

 

hopefully it will cost less than the Revo drive!!

[Eric1024]

Another site reviewed this drive and someone posted about it a few weeks ago (here: http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/12974-asus-raidr-reviewfinallly) and I'll post the same thing here as I posted there because I feel the exact same way:

 

Blah, I hate to be a Debbie Downer, but this thing is too small (capacity), not fast enough to make it attractive to users, and definitely two expensive.

They could have fit so much more flash on that board if they wanted to.



Just look. Compared to a lot of pcie cards this pcb is damn near vacant.
The back is much worse. Very little going on here.

Granted this (below) is a raid controller and not an ssd, but look at the difference in component density:

Just look at how dense the components are. This is an lsi 9260 btw.

That and they're only using 16GB dies. Really guys? That controller can support up to 16x32GB dies, or 8x64GB dies for a total of 512GB of space.
Proof:
LSI's controller info: http://www.lsi.com/p...-2200-2100.aspx
Other drives using that controller, may with up to 16 nand dies: http://thessdreview.com/tag/sf-2281/
Specifically: http://thessdreview....ame-mainstream/

Some of the intel 525 msata drives in that last link are using the SF2281 with 64GB nand dies, so it's definitely possible. So even if asus didn't want to try to increase component density and use 12x or 16x32GB dies per controller, they could easily just swap in 64GB dies and bam, you have a 1TB ssd. Then, they could make the whole board smaller and save the end user a *bit* of money.

Now that I've complained enough about design, let's discuss performance. This thing is ... well, slow. For about the same price as the 240GB version, I can throw together two 256GB 840 pro's or ocz vectors in raid 0. Those will give you double the capacity, slightly better the performance, as well as lower power consumption and better serviceability (you can replace one drive if one drive dies. On the RAIDR, if one of the two drives dies, you need an entirely new card. (Yes, you would loose all data either way but with raid 0 I would just assume backups)

And I have a few final thought/questions/answers. What's the market for this? Performance enthusiasts and power users. What do those two clientele groups look for in products? Generally, price, performance, and sometimes aesthetics. (As a side note, I will admit, this thing is absolutely gorgeous, no question about it).

One last thing... PCIe 2.0, really guys?

 

Quote

As with other high data rate serial transmission protocols, the clock is embedded in the signal. At the physical level, PCI Express 2.0 utilizes the8b/10b encoding scheme^[27] to ensure that strings of consecutive ones or consecutive zeros are limited in length. This coding was used to prevent the receiver from losing track of where the bit edges are. In this coding scheme every eight (uncoded) payload bits of data are replaced with 10 (encoded) bits of transmit data, causing a 20% overhead in the electrical bandwidth. To improve the available bandwidth, PCI Express version 3.0 employs 128b/130b encoding instead: similar but with much lower overhead.

http://en.wikipedia....ta_transmission

Okay so time for some more math before I explain what that all means. PCIe 2.0 spec is 500MB/s/lane (that's megabytes, not bits), which means the 2x interface on the RADR gets 2x500MB/s or 1GB/s of total bandwidth. BUT WAIT. PCIe 2.0 has 8b/10b encoding, meaning that only 8 bits of actual data get sent for every 10 bits transmitted (the rest is used for overhead and a kind of signal error correction and prevention, if you will).
This means that the 1GB/s that the device would otherwise have is really only 800MB/s. This explains why the drive never broke 800MB/s in the sequential tests (and makes me wonder how the hell ASUS thinks they got over 800MB/s in any test as per their specs).

However, as evidenced in the ATTO QD4 1MB write benchmark on page 6 of the review that op posted, the drive is very much hitting that celling.

It seems to me like they were going for something extreme but kind of cut off half way there. What could they have done? (here comes the fun hypothetical part where we get to imagine things and drool)

1. Easy, so easy, put 64GB or 32GB dies on it and make a 512GB/1TB model (for the love of god people will buy it, that's one of the things PCIe ssd's stand out for: capacity.

2. I know this is a bit harder to quantify and a bit stupid to suggest because it sure as hell isn't this simple, but they really should have tried to target this thing for a lower price point. If they had a 512GB version for 650$, I'd strongly consider it.

3. Granted the drive doesn't perform anywhere close to the 800MB/s pcie 2.0 2x limit except in one test, they should still at least allow the drive some bloody breathing room. Give it either PCIe 2.0 4x or PCIe 3.0 2x ... please? I mean really. That seems like such a basic early design decision that they just blatantly ignored.

4. Okay, this one's a little out of reach, but this is obviously an extreme product (or trying to be), so why not make it actually extreme? Why not put 4 ssd controllers on it in raid 0 (or better yet, 5) so the thing can really smoke sata drives in sequential speeds. OR just spend some time optimizing the bloody firmware so the thing can actually perform better as it (if you don't believe firmware optimization can do much, go read about intel's DC s3700 ssd. Link http://thessdreview....-reviews/s3700/

I'm not going to lie. I was very excited for this product, but as it stands I'm very disappointed. I hope with a few generational iterations ASUS can actually become a major player in the ssd market, because generally they make very good products. (though as it stands the ssd market is dominated by he who has the fab (intel, micron/crucial, and samsung), so that's probably not going to happen)