Given a common read heavy load and an interface that constrains the bandwidth of a single disk, a lot of performance is left on the table. While disk writes end up the same as a single disk, disk reads can be up to twice as fast.

It is entirely possible and not unlikely that someone with a NAS uses disk mirroring. Now, you don’t loose a lot of speed here and it is arguably not noticable, but lets introduce some practical scenarios to the mix. More realistically, you get around 950Mbps ~= 119MBps. There are plenty of single HDDs that exceed this rate for sequential transfers. Gigabit ethernet theoretically caps out at 1Gbps = 125MBps. Since the PCE-AC67 is a 3×3 antenna board, we'd expect the PCE-AC88 and its 4×4 configuration to fetch a significant premium. None of the usual online retail suspects have listed the board for sale yet, but Anandtech points out that the board’s little brother, the PCE-AC68, sells for $95 at retail. The PCE-AC88 features an absolutely massive heatsink-at least for a wireless add-in board. If the antenna base is too big for you, the antennas can be removed and attached directly to the card. Asus' own RT-AC88U and RT-AC5300 both fit the bill. Anandtech notes that for the board to get its full theoretical throughput, it’ll have to be paired with a high-end router that supports the TurboQAM and NitroQAM standards. The PCE-AC88 achieves these mad megabit rates with a combination of Broadcom’s BCM4366 SoC and a fancy four-antenna base. According to the site, this PCIe x1 802.11ac card is capable of throughput of up to 2167Mb/s-theoretically higher than most wired Ethernet installations in the home. Anandtech has gotten wind of some fancy new networking hardware from Asus: the PCE-AC88 4×4 Wi-Fi adapter.

Asus pce ac68 sale