RunCore Pro V 120GB Solid-State Drive Review

Capacity, Final Thoughts & Conclusions

With the refresh of the Pro V SSD line, RunCore has increased the capacity available to the user from 100GB to 120GB. With 128GB physically on board, that leaves around 8GB for overprovisiong that will be used for drive maintenance.

The Pro V is one of the few drives to come with the ability to connect to a USB port which is nice for data migration. They make it easy to do. The SATA II to USB connector just needs to be attached and fitted into the chrome piece and then the entire enclosure screws together. Performance will be severely hampered because of the limited bandwidth
of USB 2.0 so nix any ideas of using it as an external USB drive
ongoing – it would just be a waste of a good drive. Outside of the enclosure, the drive is very attractive. If you are into bling, the engraved brushed aluminum shell may ring your bell.

As far as the SATA II performance goes, we saw greater performance than the 260MB/s read/write specifications RunCore lists in their specifications. In the ATTO benchmark, we saw closer to 275MB/s writes and 285MB/s reads. Overall, its well on par with the other SandForce drives we’ve tested, which we anticipated, as the drives already push the SATA II bandwidth limits so its nearly impossible to do any better.

At $319.99, the cost per usable gigabyte is roughly $2.87 which is a fair amount higher than some of its peers which are closer to the $2.00 mark. They do include the extra of the USB enclosure which is sold separately for just over $20 so it doesn’t overcome the price difference. They also have a two-year warranty where many of the other drives on the market today have been upped to three years. Still, for this generation of drives you can’t do much better unless you look towards a PCI-E based drive.

Soon the next generation of controllers will be hitting the market with 25nm NAND and SATA 6Gbps interfaces. At that point look for the prices on existing drives to drop although I’m forecasting it will take some time for significant price drops as many users still are not using boards that support SATA 6Gbps so adoption of the new drives may be a little slow at the outset.

Legit Bottom Line: RunCore has upped the capacity of their Pro V SSDs and while their performance is excellent and comes with an external USB 2.0 enclosure, consumers may look to one of the many other SandForce drives on the market with a lower price tag.