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The latest addition to the Asus ROG (Republic Of Gamers) Strix Arion external drive product line is the Strix Arion S500 which joins the ROG Strix Arion and Strix Arion Lite. The Arion and Arion Lite are enclosures for you to add your own NVMe M/2 drive, whereas the new Arion S500 comes with a 500GB NVMe SSD pre-installed.
The M.2 NVMe drive inside the Strix Arion S500 uses a PS5012-E12S-32 controller. The 28nm quad-core controller has 8-NAND channels and provides 256‐bit AES disk and data encryption for the drive. There's is a 10Gbps NVMe to USB-C internal bridge. The controller looks after four packages of Toshiba BiCS4 96-layer 3D TLC NAND. The official performance rating for the drive is up to 1050 MB/s.
When tested with ATTO and AS SSD we couldn't quite make that maximum figure with ATTO producing a read score of 1,011MB/s with writes at 1,016MB/s. AS SSD gave slightly slower results of 1,003MB/s and 996MB/s for read and writes respectively. Switching over to CrystalDiskMark, we could confirm the official figure in default and 0 fill tests for both the default and Peak Performance profiles. The best read figure we saw was 1,063MB/s with peak writes at 1,059MB/s.
The drive comes with NTI Backup Now EZ7 software loaded on it which supports PC image and file backups, cloud backups and scheduled incremental backups.
We found the Asus ROG Strix Arion S500 on Overclockers UK and Amazon for £109.99 (inc VAT) HERE
Pros
- Cool design.
- Performance.
- Thermal pads for internal components.
Cons
- Smallish capacity.
- Pricey for a 500GB drive.
Kitguru says: The Asus Arion ROG Strix S500 is a striking looking external SSD that performs well but the 500GB capacity is looking a bit mean especially given its price tag.
