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I have been saying for some time now that mSATA SSDs would soon find there way into each and every notebook and things are well on there way.
To think that a little ingenuity could see a laptop today pushing transfer speeds above 500MB/s with a terabyte plus hard drive right beside it.
This raw power in ultraportables such as the Samsung Series 9 or Asus UX21 is mouth watering to say the least. It is something that I am hoping to test first hand in upcoming weeks.
We were able to easily find the Runcore T50 mSATA SSD E-tailers for $129 (30GB), $199(60GB) and $359 for the 120GB capacity that we tested today. This release will see phones ringing soon enough at Runcore as manufacturers are well aware that we expect to get what we pay for. It should be a natural that our purchase of a premium Sandy Bridge notebook should have a SATA 3 SSD such as the T50 included or at least an option in purchase.
As far as our own testing of this drive in a notebook, calls have been made to Dell, Samsung and Lenovo and we hope to test the T50 in a system soon enough. Quite frankly, I am still sitting here with the T50 in hand and very much in awe of its size, weight, speed, capacity and thought of technological change that may be. In fact, thanks to Runcore, I am the ONLY person in the world with this drive in hand (unavoidable smile) as mine arrived just ahead of distribution. Thank you Runcore.
Actually, come to think of it, the idea of a 6Gbps mSATA SSD isn’t that of Runcore alone as we had a peek of one first hand in SandForces suite at Computex in Taiwan just a few months back. A number of hours later we happened to be doing an A-Data interview during which one of their representatives pulled out the A-Data prototype SF-2281 mSATA for just a second. Ideas and prototypes don’t cut it though and this may just be a great first glance at a company that plans on making some big moves in SSD technology starting right now.
After all, Runcore only recently stretched their wings in expanding their operations from China all the way to California, USA. Add to this the fact that Runcore has just issued a press release stating that construction is underway for a new factory in China which is expected to be completed early next year. This ‘SSD Super Factory’ will be the largest facility of it’s kind and, as a result of it’s advanced equipment, will make Runcore the most influential SSD manufacturer in Asia. Could it be that Runcore plans on becoming OCZ’s Asian counterpart?
For now though, full complements have to go to Runcore as the T50 is an amazing SSD, certainly deserving of our Editors Choice
INDEX
Pg1 – Introduction, Compatibility & Packaging
Pg2 – Internals, Test Bench & Testing Protocol
Pg3 – ATTO, Crystal Disk Mark and Anvil Storage Utilities
Pg4 – HDTune Pro Benchmarks
Pg5 – PCMark Vantage Testing, mSATA SSDs Compared & The SSD Hierarchy
Pg6 – The Verdict
Great review (as always)!
These mSATA drives are amazingly small & light and to get those kinds of speeds just take SSDs to a new level.
How do you feel about the life expectancy?
I’m hooked otherwise…
I have learned not to concern myself whatsoever with life expectancy. We never did with a hard drive and we know these will last much longer than a hard drive. To add to that, we also know that at the end of life expectancy, we are not going to be subject to a crash where we lose all data, but rather, all data is still on the ssd to be read from and just not written to any further.