I’ve just installed the new Runcore Pro IV SATA-2 SSD drive into my Gigabyte Touchnote. I think we’re looking at one of the fastest disks ever to be seen in a netbook and one of the best CrystalMark scores we’ve ever seen here. (*1)

22864 is about 4x what we normally see on a netbook or UMPC with an HDD.

127MB/s read speed is twice as fast as the original 160GB SATA disk.

Theoretical figures don’t translate one-to-one to changes in user experience though and as the SATA drive in the Touchnote was already fast at 60MB/s read, real-world differences won’t be as extreme. Booting up was quicker (at about 30 seconds, 40 seconds including POST for this heavily loaded, 1 month-old installation is 20-seconds quicker than normal) and applications are starting almost instantaneously.  IE7, Movie Maker, Adobe Reader, Windows Live Gallery, Chrome, Paint Shop Pro all start (first run after boot) in 1 second or less. Hibernation wasn’t noticeably quicker and standby is, understandably, the same. As far as battery life and heat are concerned, I’ll have to do some more testing.

There were a few issues with duplicating the disk but none of these can be attributed to Runcore. I have a pre-release prototype drive without the USB port so I had to use True Image to copy the original 160GB and squash the partitions into 64GB. The second problem is that the Gigabyte install uses a Grub (or Lilo, I’m not sure which) boot loader which allows access to the restore partition. On copying the disk, the boot loader didn’t work so as a fix, I tried an XP and Linux CD image in order to re-write the MBR. Unfortunately FixMBR on XP didnt work and my CDROM isn’t playing well as a boot drive with the BIOS on the Touchnote so after messing around for a few hours I had to download Ubuntu Netbook for USB installation and install Ubuntu just to fix the boot loader. It fixed the boot loader but the recovery partition is now inaccessible. I’ll have a play around with Ubuntu 9.04 for a while and then clean it up next week. I’m sure other netbooks are going to much simpler than this one!

The question now is, is it worth it? I’ve lost about 80GB of drive space that I was using to carry around some media and as the SATA drive was already fast, the end-user difference isn’t that great. The 64GB drive costs around 50% of the cost of this, already high-end netbook, and with such a low-powered platform, there are obviously other bottlenecks that will come into play so at the end of the day, its a tough call. I’ll run with it for a week and report back then but with the Gigabyte Touchnote performing so well with it’s 3G, Draft-N, multi-touch pad, BT2.1, ExpressCard/34 slot and touchscreen, it’s tempting to keep it installed just to highlight how far the netbook platform can be pushed.

In the meantime, I can definitely say that if you if you have a year-old laptop that needs a refresh (this drive is going to work well with HDD-happy Vista) or if you simply want one of the fastest drives available, the RunCore Pro IV is fantastic value.

Stay tuned for a video over the next few days. Check out the Runcore press Release and if you want to be early in line, pre-order form here. The Pro IV will be shipping in just a few weeks.

(*1) A fast 1.8” SSD in the Everun Note UMPC beats this by a big margin due to the relatively powerful CPU. and GPU [See an example here.]

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.