I haven’t done much work with SSD upgrades since my CF conversion on the Q1 Ultra which, seriously, unleashed the device from the slow hard drive and turned it into a different kind of UMPC. Since then I’ve been watching JKKmobile (the king of SSD mods!) carefully and after using the SSD-based UMID MBook am convinced that a good SSD is ALWAYS worth having on a UMPC. Access speed, R/W speed, noise, heat, power and ruggedness are all positives. It’s only the capacity and cost that you need to think twice about.
Runcore sent me a 2.5” SSD a few weeks ago that I haven’t unwrapped yet as I’ve been busy with the UMID, Q1EX, Touchnote and Viliv S5 but now that I’ve seen the press release and learnt that it’s the new Pro IV 32GB SSD I’ll probably test it out next week by dropping it into the Touchnote. It will give it a big speed bump but with the 2.5” drive taking 10-15% of the power of the device, the SSD should give me a significant improvement in battery life. I’m expecting 15 mins extra to take the Touchnote up to a reliable 3.5hrs battery life on the standard battery.
The ProIV is available in 32, 64, 128 and 256GB sizes with a very useful USB-enabled enclosure that makes cloning a very simple process. “This process should not take anyone, including a novice user, more than 10-20 minutes to complete. A 15-day free trial of Acronis True Image for PC and Super Duper for the Mac are included on the drive.”
Tweektown have already done a test on a high-end test rig and seem to be extremely happy with the device, even when compared to high-speed hard drives but I do have one problem with the device, it’s not really for UMPCs. UMPCs generally use 1.8” 4200RPM drives of up to 60GB and swapping these out makes a huge difference. When it’s a reasonably fast 160GB drive that you’re swapping out, it’s a different matter. This device is really aimed at traditional laptops where swapping out a 2-year old HDD and re-installing a fresh OS is going to make an unbelievable difference. Runcore have agreed to send over some 1.8” drives that I can test in UMPCs so I’m looking forward to that.
Check out details in the Press Release and the pre-order form here. The ProIV should start shipping on 15th May.
May 2nd, 2009 at 10:16 am
New article: Runcore Pro IV SATA SSD with USB enclosure announced. http://cli.gs/N0rMqb
May 2nd, 2009 at 9:19 pm
I always believe that SSD are simple devices, and they are…
These companies all they do are buying nand flash from Samsung, HynixSemiconductor or whatever and design a controller, or just buy it off some other company, pack it into a case, here u are, a SSD….
the only problem to them is, worth investing a new production line or not….
same to UMPC really… their only difference are the cases… ==.==”
May 3rd, 2009 at 6:41 pm
i tested ssd drives in my eee900 and it is amazing how they speed up. i tested 32gb runcore and super talent and they have the same speed on that device cause the bottleneck there is than the cpu
now i whait for the ocz ssd, i will test it too.
but for all who whants ssd now dont forgett:
- alingment under xp or vista is important
- ssdtweaker is also good for settings specialy on xp and vista
i love ssd
Loren Reply:
May 23rd, 2009 at 5:43 pm
So should I buy the Super Talent, is it really as fast as the Runcore. It seemms to be avalable in the 90/55 speed at a lower cost.
saperalot Reply:
May 23rd, 2009 at 9:59 pm
The Runcore are the fastest i know, but Super Talent is a good Choice too. They are not as fast as the Runcore but fast enough on Netbooks. The Difference is not so effusive. I tested both and i am happy with the Super Talent in my Asus 900.
The Speed of Write and Read is not so much important anyway. The important Speed is the 4k write and read. But this is not shown by the producers. Check out jkk Website too.
Hope this helps and excuse my english
May 4th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
“Runcore have agreed to send over some 1.8” drives that I can test in UMPCs so I’m looking forward to that.”
Good luck with that. We’ve all been waiting for the 1.8″ ZIF drives for months! Its a shame that no one else is making 1.8″ ZIF SSDs.