ASUS is Getting Ready to Launch its First Internal SSD

With Gigabyte and more recently MSI offering internal consumer SSDs, it now looks like ASUS is getting ready to join the fray. There's no shortage of companies that are selling SSDs and most are based on very similar hardware and firmware, so the question is what ASUS is going to bring to the market to differentiate itself from the competition. The company hasn't provided any real details at this point in time, beyond a picture posted on its Taiwanese Facebook page.

The picture doesn't give away a ton of details, but what's clear is that ASUS aims to use its ROG gaming brand for the first product that ends up under the Strix sub-brand. The first drive will be called SQ7 and it's a standard M.2 PCIe 4.0 drive that not unsurprisingly uses four PCIe lanes and will come in at least a 1 TB size. It's possible that ASUS will launch its new SSD either during its "Boundless" event on the 17th of May, or during Computex, which kicks off on the 24th of May.

Update: Based on the sharp-eyed observations of our Editor-In-Chief, its highly likely that the ASUS ROG Strix SSD will be based on Phison's E18 controller, paired with Micron's 176-layer NAND, using Phison's reference PCB design. This means that ASUS would go straight after other high-performance drives, like the Kingston KC3000, Corsair MP600 Pro LPX and MSI's Spatium M480. Keep in mind that not all early product shots are of the actual product though, so we're just going to have to wait and see what ASUS brings to the table.