Friday, June 3rd 2022
ASUS ROG Strix SQ7 Specifications Finally Revealed
Just under a month ago, ASUS posted a teaser for its first internal SSD, the ROG Strix SQ7 and now the company has finally released the full specs. It is indeed based around the 12 nm Phison E18 controller, as predicted by our Editor-In-Chief, something he spotted from the sneak peek picture. Although ASUS didn't specifically mention what kind of flash the drive is using, they kindly left the flash model number visible in one of its pictures of the drive. Although the full model name isn't visible, enough of it is visible to identify it as Micron's 176-layer TLC flash. The ROG Strix SQ7 also sports a DDR4 cache, as expected, although ASUS doesn't mention clock speeds.
ASUS claims the drive will deliver sequential read speeds of up to 7000 MB/s and write speeds of up to 6000 MB/s, which places the ROG Strix SQ7 in direct competition with several other Phison E18 based high-end drives from the likes of Kingston, MSI, Sabrent and others. Unfortunately, ASUS doesn't mention IOPS or random performance, although an unspecified "large" SLC cache is mentioned. Other features include TGC Opal and AES 256-bit encryption. ASUS also provides its own SSD dashboard, which of course is ROG branded, but looks like a skinned version of Phison's standard SSD dashboard, rather than something custom made. ASUS also provides a copy of NTI Backup Now EZ software and the drives appear to have a five year warranty. ASUS mentions PS5 compatibility outside of the PC space. No word on pricing or retail availability was provided and so far ASUS has only listed a 1 TB model.
Source:
ASUS ROG
ASUS claims the drive will deliver sequential read speeds of up to 7000 MB/s and write speeds of up to 6000 MB/s, which places the ROG Strix SQ7 in direct competition with several other Phison E18 based high-end drives from the likes of Kingston, MSI, Sabrent and others. Unfortunately, ASUS doesn't mention IOPS or random performance, although an unspecified "large" SLC cache is mentioned. Other features include TGC Opal and AES 256-bit encryption. ASUS also provides its own SSD dashboard, which of course is ROG branded, but looks like a skinned version of Phison's standard SSD dashboard, rather than something custom made. ASUS also provides a copy of NTI Backup Now EZ software and the drives appear to have a five year warranty. ASUS mentions PS5 compatibility outside of the PC space. No word on pricing or retail availability was provided and so far ASUS has only listed a 1 TB model.
27 Comments on ASUS ROG Strix SQ7 Specifications Finally Revealed
We have a pretty good idea what the market rate for an E18 + Micron 176L solution is. My best guess is that the fanboy tax here will be about 30-40% but it's crazy because these are just going to get buried out of sight under the heatsinks anyway.
The best they can do, is to tweak the firmware. Does Asus even have in-house competence to do this?
"I feel the need... the need... for some MOAR supeeeed!" - Maverick & Goose (well, kinda)
So, premium for premium price...and the premium is the Asus tag. 0/5, skip.
I would soooo be interested.. Buy a 2TB version, drop it into MLC mode and rest confident that the NAND durability will be greatly increased! Sure, that would reduce the space to 1.33TB, but I can live with that!
The idea of an SSD where I can run a specific folder (say a games library) as QLC and the rest of the drive as MLC for performance is appealing, but I'm not sure there's enough demand to make it happen. Not yet at least.
Largely because the controller needs to be able to handle all of the variables that any change would imply.But it's not SLC though, it's called pseudo-SLC mode for a reason. You're just writing to one third of the TLC gates.Again, it would be pseudo-QLC mode. It doesn't guarantee that the cells will last longer, even though in theory they might.
From a purely technical perspective, forcing a NAND controller to use TLC NAND as MLC should be as trivial as using the same NAND as SLC in a caching mode.