Introduction

At Computex 2011 Cameron was hand delivered a new product from RunCore that we weren't expecting. The new RunCore Pro V Plus builds upon the success of the original Pro V, but changes the script a bit by using new IMFT 25nm flash. Drives with this controller / flash combination made a lot of noise in the tech press a few months ago. To make a long story short, one SSD manufacturer (not RunCore) made changes to their build of materials list and started selling new 25nm drives under the same model name as the older 3xnm drives. The new 25nm offerings are a bit slower than the older models and also have less user accessible capacity.

Obviously a change big enough to affect performance and user capacity should be noted and that is exactly what RunCore is doing with their new Pro V Plus model. For the most part we've been pretty quiet about the whole deal just telling people to stay away from the undocumented model affected. Part of that was due to not having a SandForce SF-1200 drive paired with 25nm flash, but that all changes this week; we now have two of them in house including one from RunCore and the other from a new company call Strontium. Today we're going to take a quick look at a bare RunCore Pro V Plus that was hand delivered to us.

In the retail and e-tail market RunCore sells these drives in two different kits. The first is a Notebook Upgrade Kit and the second is called a Desktop DIY Kit.