Cool but not unless you get more then 1

[Ravage6652]

They look cool but unless your buying more then one of them and raiding the raidr's they are not much of a advantage over modern systems running the latest ssd's. speed wise they are not much faster then a single ssd and at 240gb they are totally spanked by samsungs new evo drives at up to 1TB in size and the new ROG mobos come with the same ramdisk feature so for me I think ill wait and get Santa to get me a couple for xmas

Here is a cool video with JJ showing the throughput advantage of pci over sata ssd's.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27GmBzQWwP0

So unless your gonna raid like 4 of them to take advantage of the higher throughput from pci slots its not really much different then a new sata ssd

Seems like a silly idea to market a pci based ssd that isn't taking advantage of the much higher speeds it can handle. Now if you released the raidr that did speeds over 3gb then it would be something that is worth using a pci based card on.

[Praz]

PCIe storage devices can only be part of an array if the array is created from within the operating system. This type of an array will not be bootable.

[Nodens]

speed wise they are not much faster then a single ssd and at 240gb they are totally spanked by samsungs new evo drives at up to 1TB in size and the new ROG mobos come with the same ramdisk feature so for me I think ill wait and get Santa to get me a couple for xmas

Not sure where you get your data but it's aprox. 55% faster than a Samsung 840 Pro (which is one of the fastest consumer single drives). The EVO drives you're referring to also have aprox the same specs with the 840 Pro (just lower IOPS if I recall right) which makes the RAIDR faster than the EVO drives by the same margin. The only thing the EVO drives have is density (1TB) but that's because they use TLC NAND instead of MLC. +55% speed can hardly be called "not much faster than a single ssd".

OCZ Revo 3 drives are faster than RAIDR but they are also PCIe cards, more expensive and they don't support UEFI booting (CSM disabled).

Seems like a silly idea to market a pci based ssd that isn't taking advantage of the much higher speeds it can handle. Now if you released the raidr that did speeds over 3gb then it would be something that is worth using a pci based card on.

Do you have any idea of the cost the card would have in order to reach the speeds you are actually talking about? With SLC NAND the cost would be a very "nice" 4digit number. With MLC NAND it would be about half of that.

Bottomline is ASUS is making an affordable PCIe card that's very fast compared to single ssd drives and is native UEFI compliant. That's what the product is.

[Deon017]

I come from an Intel 520 Series 240GB ssd to the Raid and the difference is very noticeable - then with the ram disk setup - software emulation there are far more perks to the ASUS RAIDR then any other drive on the market. I have the rampage extreme mb and it does not have all the same software as the RAIDR.

[Ravage6652]

The evo 750 gb with rapid mode enabled its read write speeds are reported to be 800-1000mb as a single drive according to multiple sources benchmarks. The Raidr Express as a raid 0 pci ssd the is reported in the 800-900mb speed. So I really don't see your 55% increase in speed difference plus the evo destroys the Raidr in just useful size. With games like WoW in the 20gb size as well as SWTOR and Rome II thats 60gb for just 3 games my old 250 ssd with the OS and a couple games was pretty much full with all my other games delegated to my 1TB WD Black hence my reason to jump on the 750gb ssd from samsung.

I'm not saying the Raidr is bad it isn't !! But for being a PCI slot based ssd they could have utilized the huge speed capability of PCI to make it a much more attractive solution over current SATA ssd's. And with the new formula mobo also having ramdisk as well again the Raidr looses a lot of ground there too. The raidr is cool no question about that, But maybe in the future when they crank it up to better speed and size to actaully take advantage of the PCI slot it will be a more attractive choice.

Here are a couple screen grabs from some reviews I found online on the 750 evo

[Nodens]

You are comparing apples and oranges mate. EVO Rapid mode is basically DRAM caching and its limited to 1GB of cache. ROG RAMDisk is exactly the same thing without being limited to 1GB DRAM cache. So basically you can not compare EVO Rapid mode with the RAIDR not using the RAMDisk software. On basic specs the RAIDR is 55% faster (The EVO is rated 540/520). Once Rapid mode and ROG RAMDISK come into play the RAIDR is still faster due to not being limited to 1GB DRAM cache.

Like I said the only advantage the EVO drives have is density. Nothing else. And you won't see any cards hitting the limits of the bus unless the NAND prices drop dramatically. A 3000-4000$ drive would not be very attractive to anyone other than enterprise users.

[Ravage6652]

What I am comparing is more SATA to PCI and as a PCI based ssd the raidr has the body of a formula 1 supercar capable of ripping up a race track at 300+mph but come race day you dropped in a engine from your average honda civic and put it out on the street to take the kids to school in. The evo using dram cashe or whatever can still do 1000mb using sata and your pci ssd can do 1000mb as well even tho it could be doing 3000mb because pci can push that through where SATA cannot so limiting your PCI to SATA speeds just seems strange when it could be so much more faster unlike SATA.

When I get all my new parts in i'll be building my new computer with a 750 evo card using rapid mode and with my new formula VI motherboard that comes with the ramdisk i'll be setting that up as well to run off my 32 gb of ram. I think the raidr is cool and would probably buy one but there really seems to be no reason to when its limited to SATA speeds right now and at 240 gb which is really 2x120gb ssds in raid 0 it really isn't useful for more than a boot drive because so many games are now in the 20+GB size range your very limited at 240 after the OS as to what you can put on it.

It just seems to me that releasing it against the newer ssd's a lot of the advantages and functions are kinda lacking when you look at the ssd as a whole. The boot option is cool but sure last week when I turned my computer on that few seconds would have been a lifesaver but since then it been running non stop downloading and folding or whatever when i'm not actually using it.

[Myk SilentShadow]

DUDE!!!!! seriously you're not listening to what you're being told, currently the PCIe SSD offerings can only go that far due to the cost of the Flash Chips, they're too expensive for the ultra-fast ones for the enthusiast market...how hard is that to comprehend? when those chips come down in price, then the PCIe drives will too get a speed boost, not before. And yeah, I do agree with you on the 240GB limit...but even the current price outside of the US...it's cheaper to just get multiple SSD's and RAID them...though you won't get the same numbers and like you said at the beginning, you'd have to have like 4 to get insane numbers. Case closed

[_]

DUDE!!!!! seriously you're not listening to what you're being told, currently the PCIe SSD offerings can only go that far due to the cost of the controller, they're too expensive for the ultra-fast ones for the enthusiast market...how hard is that to comprehend? when those chips come down in price, then the PCIe drives will too get a speed boost, not before. And yeah, I do agree with you on the 240GB limit...but even the current price outside of the US...it's cheaper to just get multiple SSD's and RAID them...though you won't get the same numbers and like you said at the beginning, you'd have to have like 4 to get insane numbers. Case closed

Fixed. We're limited by what PCIe to SATA controllers are available. The price goes up exponentially as you cross the boundary into enterprise territory, where they are designed and bundled with security or business features normal users don't require. We've already got people saying this model is too expensive, so we've really had to balance the best priceerformance. Yes, you can go '3x' faster, but very few people will pay '6-10x' the price.

With SATA Express the next step, this will deliver more SATA-to-PCIe controllers so this market should grow. This is just our first product after all.