SSD/Storage – ASUS ROG RAIDR Express PCI-E 240GB PCIe 2.0 x 2 MLC SSD
Unlike our original build where we tried to get things as small as possible with an mATX board, we know have a full sized ATX workstation board and an extra card slot for this. The ASUS ROG RAIDR is the company’s first PCI-E solid state drive solution for the consumer market. Originally announced at CES 2013, this product features 240GBs of storage, which is 16GBs less than the Mac Pro’s 256GB PCI-E SSD, but puts out very high performance with read and write speeds well above 800MB/s real world. It sells for $349.99 US and should work great in the ASUS workstation board we’ve chosen.
Although we could still run two smaller SSDs in RAID0 on the SATA3 channels, we wanted to come as close to the Mac Pro as we could and this is the way we do it. But it is worth noting that we could save quite a bit by picking up a couple of 128GB SSDs instead. And of course we’d have internal SATA3 channels to spare for additional drives internally as needed. Which would be great for scratch/cache and wouldn’t suffer the odd occasional drop outs that externally connected devices seem to give us once in a while.
OK. Let’s see how we did this time!