ASUS has shared a teaser on its official Taiwanese Facebook page that reveals the development of a new M.2 NVMe SSD with ROG Strix branding. The promotional image is extremely light on details, but it does confirm that the SSD will leverage a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface, as well as the decal design of its graphene heat spreader, which naturally features a Republic of Gamers logo. ASUS’s new ROG Strix SQ7 M.2 PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe SSD will presumably come in additional capacities aside from the 1 TB version shown in the image.
The rather simplistic graphene heat spreader is not an indicator of anything. It can hide a modest mid-range turnkey SSD solution or a custom high-performance drive with a proprietary controller and firmware (Samsung’s top-of-the-range 980 Pro client SSD comes with a graphene heat spreader, for example). Given that this is Asus’s first hooray into internal SSDs, we believe it is reasonable to assume that the company is using a turnkey solution, yet with some customizations to justify the Asus ROG branding. Meanwhile, a 1TB capacity indicates that Asus wants to address the sweet spot of the gaming SSD market.
Source: ASUS (via Tom’s Hardware)