RunCore Pro V Max 120GB SATA III SSD Review

Inside the RunCore Pro V Max 120GB

Similar to the last incarnation of the RunCore Pro, the Pro V Max has a tray-like casing on the front.

This is disassembled with the removal of four screws on the sides of the drive and there are an additional four screws holding down the board. There are no thermal pads used in the construction.

A familiar sight…two rows of four NAND modules line the opening side of the PCB along with a RunCore product sticker.

A closer look reveals that the NAND is branded with the Intel “i” logo with part number 29F64G08ACME3 and is 25nm MLC flash memory. Each are 16GB in density with a total on board capacity of 128GB.

On the flip side we have the remaining eight NAND chips resting next to the controller. Those familiar with SandForce drives know not to look for the cache as none of the SandForce controllers use one.

The now nearly ubiquitous SandForce SD-2281 should be familiar to most users who know anything at all about SSDs. Nearly every SSD manufacturer has a SandForce based drive and for good reason – it’s fast and does a great job of preserving that speed. Using its DuraClass technology, it employs proprietary wear-leveling algorithms, real-time compression, 256-AES encryption and a host of other duties in a neat little package. Although there have been some issues with users experiencing BSOD’s, this doesn’t appear to be impact the vast majority of users and some makers have customized their firmware to mitigate or eliminate this problem. RunCore has told us that their drives running the “Golden” firmware have not experienced any BSOD issues that they are aware of which should be of some comfort to prospective buyers.