RunCore Pro V SSD review Part 3 of 3

Sun, 22/08/2010 - 11:16

Real Life Tests:

All the benchmarks can show you how fast this RunCors SSD is, but they can’t show you how it is to work with. What are your everyday tools? Your computer probably run Win XP, Vista, Seven or even one of those Linux distributions. You check your e-mails, browse the web, watch some videos and work hard on your presentation or edit a picture… What can you do to make your computer faster? You can upgrade RAM, switch to a faster CPU, but normally the bottle-neck is always your harddrive. This is the point where a SSD makes a lot of sense.

I cloned my harddrive with Acronis and switched to the SSD as the primary disk. My first thought was: what happened to the slow boot-up and the slow start of all my apps on my commputer? The machine is snapier and all the copy or encrypt/decrypt, zipping tasks are done in a split of time i usually need for. You can even reanimate your old computer with it, when there is a SATA interface. All Apps are starting without any lag or hick-ups. I’ve tested the SSD in my Lenovo X61T Tablet and realized, that my processor along with the chipset are the bottlenecks from now. :-)

Usually there is a loss of power in the performance of the read/write throuput and you have to use the „Safe Erase“ option to get to the initial performance due tot he SSD technology. Normally the SSD last for 2-3 year continious usage, but the RunCore Pro V SSDs (with the Sandforce controller) could offer you up to 5 years with their special DuraWrite and DuraClass technology, although you‘ll get only 2 years garantee on the SSDs.

This SSDs support the TRIM command, which is built in into the recent Oses like Windows 7, OSX Snow Leopard, Linux Distros like Ubuntu or Fedora (depends on the Kernel oft he OS and SSD). „TRIM command allows an operating system to inform a Solid-State Drive, which data blocks, such as those belonging to a deleted file or affected by a format command, are no longer considered in use and can be wiped internally.“

Apple Tests

After some really promissing benchmarks and tests with some Windows apps, i decided that there are some Mac users out there, who want to see how these SSDs are performiing on a Mac machine. To do that i could use some help from my friend Roland (aka. @BashPunk). He is running a Mac Pro with 2x2.8Ghz Quad-Core Xeon processors and the current Mac OS X 10.6.4. We’ve installed the Mac OS X on a bare RunCore SSD and his first word was „Wow“. This was his first install that went so damn fast, that we couldn’t get our coffee before the end J. According to RunCore there are special SSDs of the Pro V Series aswell, but this should not make any difference fort he benchmarks at all, because, there is quite the same hardware and only a few minor tweaks in the firmware.

Mac OS Benchmarks

Here are some hardware specs about the Apple machine we were using fort he benchmark tests:

Example of how the RunCore V SSD is speeding up your Mac. In this video you can see that a Mac Pro can boot up in nearly 20 seconds.

source: youtube

Runcore SSD specs:

RAID 10 specs:

For the Raid 10 there are 2xWestern Digital WDC WD2500 and 2x Western Digital WDC WD5000. We’ve created a 2GB and a 12GB file which was writen and read afterwards using the internal time measurement of the OS.

2GB file:

time dd if=/dev/zero of=/Volumes/RunCore\ SSD/testfile bs=1024k count=2048

time dd of=/dev/zero if=/Volumes/RunCore\ SSD/testfile bs=1024k count=2048

12GB file

time dd if=/dev/zero of=/Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/testfile bs=1024k count=12288

time dd of=/dev/zero if=/Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/testfile bs=1024k count=12288

here are the results oft he Read&Write performance:

As you can see the write performance is better than the read performance against the RAID10 HDD disks. I know that this is not very fair for the SSD, but if you have the money to get 2 of these powerhorses, you’ll be able to smoke those HDDs.

This video shows you how fast a current Adobe Photoshop CS5 is starting with a SSD on a Mac Pro in comparison with a MacBook.

source: youtube

Verdict:

For the first time i must say, that no product was be able to hold its marketing slogans except now. RunCore managed to roll out a very good product. The build quality ist he best and the design reminds me a bit of a fruit. The Pro V is fast, reliable and well build. This SSD is performing at nearly 280MBps in read and write and it overbids even the performance which Sandforce is claiming (260MBps). I hope, that RunCore would build a SATA3 interface into that SSD in the near future, because SATA2 is not fast enough with 300MBps. The Sandforce 1200 controller is very fast. Let’s see how the RunCore SSD would stand up tot he competitors with the same controller and how the SSD will compare to the next gen.SSDs based on SandForce 1500, Marvell and Indilinx.

But where is light, there is shadow. First i was a bit disappointed oft he poor 4k performance and after a the right set up oft he allignment, it was still poor to me. Perhaps it could be fixed with a proper firmware. This ist he second dislike: there is no public firmware. And the third minus goes to the price. Nearly 800 EURO fort he high end model is way too much even for a hard core SSD and performance enthusiast like me. But when you consider, that the SSDs are not very common even in these days and the production is not at full speed in comparison to the quantity of HDDs every day, the prices would fall in near future.

The everyday work could be faster done with such a powerhorse underneath. You can even revive an old computer and after the SSD iss et up right, you realize, that you CPU ist he bottleneck now.

RunCore Pro-V SSD comes in 3 sizes:

Model: current Price: Price per MB:

50GB (RCP-V-S2550-MCN) ca. 260 EURO 5,20 EURO/MB

100GB (RCP-V-S2510-MCN) ca. 440 EURO 4,40 EURO/MB

200GB (RCP-V-S2520-MCN) ca. 770 EURO 3,85 EURO/MB

I can highly recommend this SSD, when performance does matter. If you take 2x 50GB SSD and set up a RAID 0 with them, then you’ll need SATA3 or more, because SATA2, with ist theoretical 300MBps, isn’t fast enough for such a performance.

previous:

RunCore Review Part 1 (Introduction, Look&Feel)

RunCore Review Part 2 (Benchmarks)

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