ASUS Demos its HyperXpress SSD

ASUS demonstrated its first SSD, the HyperXpress. As its name might give away, the drive is co-developed by HyperX, the enthusiast memory and storage brand of Kingston. Built in the 9.5 mm-thick 2.5-inch form-factor, the drive features SATA Express interface, which will hit the consumer space this May, with the arrival of Intel's Z97 Express chipset, and Core "Haswell Refresh" processors. Internally, there's not much to this drive. It's a host-agnostic RAID 0 array of two mSATA 6 Gb/s SSDs, wired to a host controller made by ASMedia. To the host machine, it will look like a single drive. The sample demoed to the press, ASUS claims, is a very early prototype, and future iterations could run two M.2 SSDs instead of mSATA, for even higher throughput. The drive was tested to offer sequential transfer rates as high as 778 MB/s. At Computex 2014, flash memory manufacturers are expected to launch legions of new SSDs in the SATA-Express and M.2 form-factors.