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I highly recommend the Runcore 128 GB SSD for the MBA 3X speed and performance!
- Thread starter Scottsdale
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After reading all the miracles of this RunCore SSDs I decided buy this upgrade as a Christmas present for a family member.
I looked some European website but however they all had this item out of stock, than I found MyDigitalDiscount's website, on 30th november they confirmed to have this item in stock and they quoted shipping to Moscow, so I placed the order but so far they have not yet shipped anything!
On December 1st they did confirmed to have one item reserved for my order but, again, till today nothing has shipped (they should give me all tracking informations as soon as they'll ship it)!!
I'm getting crazy, how long do they need to ship it? What is the meaning of choosing a 3 day delivery service if they take more than a week to give the item to UPS?
In a short time I'll move for Christmas vacations and I'm not sure I'll receive this item in time!
I looked some European website but however they all had this item out of stock, than I found MyDigitalDiscount's website, on 30th november they confirmed to have this item in stock and they quoted shipping to Moscow, so I placed the order but so far they have not yet shipped anything!
On December 1st they did confirmed to have one item reserved for my order but, again, till today nothing has shipped (they should give me all tracking informations as soon as they'll ship it)!!
I'm getting crazy, how long do they need to ship it? What is the meaning of choosing a 3 day delivery service if they take more than a week to give the item to UPS?
In a short time I'll move for Christmas vacations and I'm not sure I'll receive this item in time!
After reading all the miracles of this RunCore SSDs I decided buy this upgrade as a Christmas present for a family member.
I looked some European website but however they all had this item out of stock, than I found MyDigitalDiscount's website, on 30th november they confirmed to have this item in stock and they quoted shipping to Moscow, so I placed the order but so far they have not yet shipped anything!
On December 1st they did confirmed to have one item reserved for my order but, again, till today nothing has shipped (they should give me all tracking informations as soon as they'll ship it)!!
I'm getting crazy, how long do they need to ship it? What is the meaning of choosing a 3 day delivery service if they take more than a week to give the item to UPS?
In a short time I'll move for Christmas vacations and I'm not sure I'll receive this item in time!
That would drive me CRAZY. When I order things like this, I constantly track it and think about it until it arrives. Just be patient. I expect once you get it, the performance will be so good that you will forget all about the wait.
Ordered from MDD and got it within four days. Took an hour to clone my old 120Gb stock drive as I have lots of data and less than 10 min to swap it out and install the new RunCore. I must say the performance is as good as what is being shared in this thread. However, there are two issues not sure anyone else has the same experienced:
1. While booting up the Runcore, there is a delay of 35 long seconds in the usual white screen before the Apple logo appears. This happens everytime I'm booting up. Is this normal?
2. My old 120Gb stock drive doesn't work with the USB casing, anyone has the same problem?
Other than these two issues, the performance after booting up is very impressive.
1. While booting up the Runcore, there is a delay of 35 long seconds in the usual white screen before the Apple logo appears. This happens everytime I'm booting up. Is this normal?
2. My old 120Gb stock drive doesn't work with the USB casing, anyone has the same problem?
Other than these two issues, the performance after booting up is very impressive.
Ok its official we need another peace of info to go along with the drive telling people to format properly in GUID before doing the Clone.
Mr. Zarniwoop explains how to fix it here https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/8874393/
Matt Dawson
Runcore
Mr. Zarniwoop explains how to fix it here https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/8874393/
Matt Dawson
Runcore
Runcore SSD Maintenance
I have a Runcore SSD fitted to my MBA rev.C. The increase in performance is indeed awesome. My Mac friends are blown away when they see this baby in action.
But I have noticed a previous question about Runcore maintenance go unanswered and this bothers me. SSD drives are known to slow down in performance over time and this can be a very short time of you write a lot of data to the disk.
Does Runcore have any advice as to how to blank the deleted files on a drive? Since TRIM is not supported in SL, how can we ensure that the investment in our amazing Runcore drives will not just be a 5 minute wonder?
Thanks, Bizy
I have a Runcore SSD fitted to my MBA rev.C. The increase in performance is indeed awesome. My Mac friends are blown away when they see this baby in action.
But I have noticed a previous question about Runcore maintenance go unanswered and this bothers me. SSD drives are known to slow down in performance over time and this can be a very short time of you write a lot of data to the disk.
Does Runcore have any advice as to how to blank the deleted files on a drive? Since TRIM is not supported in SL, how can we ensure that the investment in our amazing Runcore drives will not just be a 5 minute wonder?
Thanks, Bizy
Hi Matt,
Thanks. Issue 1 solved after resetting the Macbook's Parameter RAM (PRAM) with the key combo Command-Option-P-R during boot time as indicated from your link. Now it boots in 26 sec as compared to previously of 59 sec. Amazing.
Hi toobizy, my 128 GB Runcore now is 90% full and I get a performance score of 189. Compare it to my stock 120 GB which has a score of 33, I reckon the 'slowdown' is quite insignificant. I'll see how much 'slower' it can get when my drive is above 95% full.
Hi UltraTux:
Well, its nice to know you are still getting such a response at 90% full. There is still a lot of mystery about the long-term performance of SSD's. A friend has a MBA with the supplied stock SSD's that he bought from Apple in June this year. It is now so slow that he can hardly use it. And he cannot find any reliable info anywhere about how to "clean" the drive and restore it to a new state.
Right now, I am still having fun showing people what the Runcore can do in my own MBA. No-one has seen this kind of response on opening programs and files.
Bizy
1. Is normal for the first few boots. Then will pickup speed. Maybe someone else can answer why this happens?
2. There is a new part that Runcore sends out to buyers that fixes that. Maybe you can send Matt at Runcore a PM; his post is right below yours.
Best wishes and congrats on your new Runcore.
Hi Bizy,
I have actually tried today doing a clean install on the 128 GB Runcore. The OS X Snow Leopard only takes 8 GB. Then I did a couple of Xbench and took the average. Surprisingly I got the same result as when it was 90% full - average score of 189. Could be the controller that is making a lot of difference compared to the Samsung SSD stock drive. And your concern about Runcore's long term reliability? They provide 2 years warranty.
Thanks for posting this and letting us know. That's great news as I tend to do clean installs on my computers once or twice a year to keep them running optimally.
A two year warranty isn't that useful if slowdown is an inherent characteristic of SSD's as they get close to full (is it or isn't it?). I'm still looking forward to more coherent and consistent information about the maintenance of SSD's. There seems to be a lot of mystery and confusion about them when you ask in computer stores or read around the web.
Bizy
Runcore testimonial
I have enjoyed reading this forum topic. I am a big Mac user (2 MBP 17", 2 MacMini's running SLServer, PowerMac Dual 1.8 G5, iPod Touch, AppleTV160, and more) and have been fascinated by the new SSD tech. I actually had a Fujitsu P1620 Lifebook with a 100GB 4200RPM Toshiba HD. Boot time was about 3:50 minutes. It took forever. I bought the Runcore 128GB ZIF/PATA, installed it using my own tools (screwdrivers are a bit inadequate), and measured the Fujitsu P1620 boot time at 17 seconds, down from 3 minutes, 50 seconds! Unbelievable. Everything else it does is blazing fast. I am absolutely a convert, and waiting until a suitably LARGE SSD is available to replace the HDs in my MacBook Pros, which DO need the larger space models. I used to think new CPU or memory upgrades were the stuff of life/performance, but SSDs are the HOT ticket. Computing changes dramatically when everything goes SSD. I can't recommend it highly enough if you can afford it. FYI, I purchased mine direct from Runcore for $460. Purchase experience was fine.
JG
I have enjoyed reading this forum topic. I am a big Mac user (2 MBP 17", 2 MacMini's running SLServer, PowerMac Dual 1.8 G5, iPod Touch, AppleTV160, and more) and have been fascinated by the new SSD tech. I actually had a Fujitsu P1620 Lifebook with a 100GB 4200RPM Toshiba HD. Boot time was about 3:50 minutes. It took forever. I bought the Runcore 128GB ZIF/PATA, installed it using my own tools (screwdrivers are a bit inadequate), and measured the Fujitsu P1620 boot time at 17 seconds, down from 3 minutes, 50 seconds! Unbelievable. Everything else it does is blazing fast. I am absolutely a convert, and waiting until a suitably LARGE SSD is available to replace the HDs in my MacBook Pros, which DO need the larger space models. I used to think new CPU or memory upgrades were the stuff of life/performance, but SSDs are the HOT ticket. Computing changes dramatically when everything goes SSD. I can't recommend it highly enough if you can afford it. FYI, I purchased mine direct from Runcore for $460. Purchase experience was fine.
JG
Because the flash memory used in today's SSDs can only be written to a certain number of times (about 10,000 on average), the controllers attempt to balance cell writes to maintain capacity.
That means at some point, the drive is likely going to have to move existing data around to balance writes. Depending on design this could happen ongoing in the background or as part of the write process. Again depending on design this could produce occasional or ongoing slowdowns.
Obviously the closer the drive is to capacity, the fewer the cells you can write to with no overhead of first moving data and the more often data is going to have to be moved to balance cell writes.
I can't speak to the designs of any particular SSD but you can see because of the need to balance writes, the SSD with ongoing use is going to incur extra overhead moving things around. Its just a matter of how good the design and controller are at hiding this from the user.
Early designs just wore out (as most usb memory sticks still do today). Modern inexpensive designs typically don't make the extra overhead completely transparent, and may require maintenance processes for optimal performance. The best and most expensive designs are fully automated and almost completely transparent under normal use.
Food for thought.
I just ordered mine for my MBA today with 2 day Fed-Ex shipping. Hopefully I'll get it Wednesday!
Thanks Bizy and Jim for sharing. Will be best if the warranty period is longer than 2 years as HDDs nowadays are either 5 years or even lifetime. In terms of maintenance - the balance cell writes Jim was saying, wonder if iDefrag helps?
Here I also like to share my tests for initial application startup times (results are the averages of 3 tests in seconds):
---------------------Bootup----Shutdown----Safari----Word 2008
120GB Hdd---------59.10--------17.16-------3.90--------32.98
128GB Runcore----28.93---------9.91--------1.10--------8.01
%Improvement----204%--------173%------356%-------412%
The Runcore is the exact clone of the HDD to demonstrate data consistency. For Safari, it could be faster as my fingers are not even fast enough to record anything less than a second. These are all first time startups after boot. Subsequent ones are even faster as they are cached.
Here I also like to share my tests for initial application startup times (results are the averages of 3 tests in seconds):
---------------------Bootup----Shutdown----Safari----Word 2008
120GB Hdd---------59.10--------17.16-------3.90--------32.98
128GB Runcore----28.93---------9.91--------1.10--------8.01
%Improvement----204%--------173%------356%-------412%
The Runcore is the exact clone of the HDD to demonstrate data consistency. For Safari, it could be faster as my fingers are not even fast enough to record anything less than a second. These are all first time startups after boot. Subsequent ones are even faster as they are cached.
I feel the same about the durability and longevity of an SSD. I'm just confused because the notion that I got after reading all of what has been posted in here, is that sooner or later the SSD will go slow and that there's nothing you can do about it. Nothing?
I mean come on, what is it good for then? I'd want the top notch performance not only in the first months but beyond.
i take it you are recording these with xbench ?
xbench does not benchmark the ssd's very well.
how about the full readout so we can see the individual random and sequential patterns.
I feel the same about the durability and longevity of an SSD. I'm just confused because the notion that I got after reading all of what has been posted in here, is that sooner or later the SSD will go slow and that there's nothing you can do about it. Nothing?
There's are an article here that explains the mechanics how an SSD works and what causes the slow down. It also compares detailed performances of various SSDs including the OCZ Vertex which uses the Indilinx controller that Runcore Pro IV SSDs uses:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=1&cp=21
After reading this article thoroughly, it comes to me with a few important questions which I hope Matt from Runcore can answer:
1) Does Runcore Pro IV SSDs support the TRIM command? And most importantly does OS X Snow Leopard support it too?
2) Can Runcore SSDs be flashed for future firmware upgrades?
3) Is there a similar tool such as Secure Erase provided by all Intel's X25 drives for the Runcore SSDs? - this will completely erase all pages in the SSD's flash NANDs and make it as good and new as from the factory first day (details from the article above).
Hi MacModMachine, the bootup and application test results are purely from my stop watch. BTW, is there a more reliable tool than Xbench you know of? These are my Xbench peak scores for reference:
My original 120GB stock HDD:-
Disk Test 28.78
Sequential 48.28
Uncached Write 51.97 31.91 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 46.29 26.19 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 42.85 12.54 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 53.54 26.91 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 20.50
Uncached Write 7.05 0.75 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 54.46 17.44 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 48.98 0.35 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 69.22 12.84 MB/sec [256K blocks]
My new Runcore 128GB SSD:-
Disk Test 195.10
Sequential 160.04
Uncached Write 198.32 121.77 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 229.99 130.13 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 77.11 22.57 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 379.47 190.72 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 249.83
Uncached Write 85.33 9.03 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 400.60 128.25 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 2190.10 15.52 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 746.62 138.54 MB/sec [256K blocks]
I feel the same about the durability and longevity of an SSD. I'm just confused because the notion that I got after reading all of what has been posted in here, is that sooner or later the SSD will go slow and that there's nothing you can do about it. Nothing?
Very good questions. I too am looking forward to reading and learning more on this topic. And yes, data security, good point too!
Cheers,