MacBook Air Rev A with RunCore 1.8" Pro IV PATA ZIF Drive *ZIF PROBLEMS*

[GillesB]

Re: MacBook Air Rev A with RunCore 1.8" Pro IV PATA ZIF Drive *ZIF PROBLEMS*

Here are the tests.

Samsung Vs Runcore in XBench



Samsung Vs Runcore in QuickBench



This is a blasting fast drive!

Mail launches in less than 2"
Word 2008 less than 5"
Excel is almost instantaneaous
Windows XP in a VMware VM is booting from scratch in less than 40"
And Autocad in that machine in 5"

For 400 € this will keep my MBA up to date for at least the next two years.

I want to publicly thank Runcore and MDD for their professionalism and their reaction, this story started bad bud ended quite well.

Another hint the total process for changing the drive and reinstalling the system took me 1hour and 1/2....

[Martijn]

Re: MacBook Air Rev A with RunCore 1.8" Pro IV PATA ZIF Drive *SOLVED!*

Dear Runcore,


Like GillesB, I can confirm the new 64Gb SSD drive is working perfectly in the Apple Macbook Air Rev. A.

It's really fast! My drive-only-Xbench-test (#1.3) score of the old 80Gb Samsung HD is 29.62. With the new SSD (formatted on HFS+ GUID), and exactly the same data (Carbon Copy Cloner), the score is 113.42 !! That's almost 4x the original speed. I surely can advise this upgrade for almost any Macbook Air Rev. A user...

Original HD Benchmark: Xbench: Comparison (red items)

SSD-Benchmark: Xbench: Comparison (red items)

Nevertheless:
I wonder if it can keep this speed in the future, because a known 'issue' with SSD is the fact that how less free space, how slower the performance. Therefore I have a question:

Is there an OSX utility for the RunCore drive to execute TRIM-commands?

[Runcore Marketing]

Re: MacBook Air Rev A with RunCore 1.8" Pro IV PATA ZIF Drive *ZIF PROBLEMS*

This is great news guys I am so happy they are working properly.

Martijn, I will check to see if there will be any sort of TRIM feature you can use.

Matt

[zaxxon]

Re: MacBook Air Rev A with RunCore 1.8" Pro IV PATA ZIF Drive *ZIF PROBLEMS*

Hi,

does anyone have comparison data with a photofast V3? According to them, the indilix should push 100MB/s which is the PATA maximum....

[Martijn]

Re: MacBook Air Rev A with RunCore 1.8" Pro IV PATA ZIF Drive *ZIF PROBLEMS*

@Zaxxon:

That's imposible: although PATA's limit is 100Mb/s (or 133Mb/s) that's the so called 'burstmode-speed' and can only be reached for very short time's. A PATA-100-interface that reaches 66Mb/s is a very good one, for example...

[Patcar13]

Re: MacBook Air Rev A with RunCore 1.8" Pro IV PATA ZIF Drive *ZIF PROBLEMS*

are there any on-line instructions on opening the air and putting the runcore into the case. it looks simple but the instruction that came with are a bad copy and too faint to read and i do not want to damage the ribbon cable for the hard drive case.

[Martijn]

Re: MacBook Air Rev A with RunCore 1.8" Pro IV PATA ZIF Drive *ZIF PROBLEMS*

@Patcar13:

Yes, iFixit did a perfect Macbook Air teardown with clear pictures en explanations...

MacBook Air Teardown - iFixit

[Patcar13]

Re: MacBook Air Rev A with RunCore 1.8" Pro IV PATA ZIF Drive *ZIF PROBLEMS*

Agree that this is easy... have one issue. i am trying to pry off the connector for the audio from the hard drive bracket and it does not seem to want to move. any advice. i donot have the spudger and i am digging into the piece below. is this move an actual break of the plastic? any advice welcomed

[Runcore Marketing]

Re: MacBook Air Rev A with RunCore 1.8" Pro IV PATA ZIF Drive *ZIF PROBLEMS*

Hi,

does anyone have comparison data with a photofast V3? According to them, the indilix should push 100MB/s which is the PATA maximum....

I saw a Samsung tablet benchmark the other day with a Runcore 1.8" zif it got 98/98 read/write so the drive definitely can get that fast. I think it has a lot to do with any bottle necks in the various computers.

Matt

[Martijn]

Re: MacBook Air Rev A with RunCore 1.8" Pro IV PATA ZIF Drive *ZIF PROBLEMS*

Agree that this is easy... have one issue. i am trying to pry off the connector for the audio from the hard drive bracket and it does not seem to want to move. any advice. i donot have the spudger and i am digging into the piece below. is this move an actual break of the plastic? any advice welcomed

I believe that is glue, not sure though.
I do remember that afterwards not everything was as sticky as before, but it didn't bother me...

[zaxxon]

Re: MacBook Air Rev A with RunCore 1.8" Pro IV PATA ZIF Drive *ZIF PROBLEMS*

How are we going to use TRIM in MacOS? It's not (yet?) supported from the OS, yes, I know.

Will this SSD support it as soon as the OS does?

Is there an equivalent of the wiper.exe? can I run that on windows with a HFS+ formatted ssd to reclaim speed/space?

would it just do GarbageCollection in the background?

and how about that 'alignment' this that one often reads about in PC forums?

[GillesB]

Re: MacBook Air Rev A with RunCore 1.8" Pro IV PATA ZIF Drive *ZIF PROBLEMS*

Matt, I need to order a couple of other drives as the tests are very good.

RUNCORE IV PRO 128

Please tell me how I can order at least one in emergency.

Gilles

[checkitout]

Re: MacBook Air Rev A with RunCore 1.8" Pro IV PATA ZIF Drive *ZIF PROBLEMS*

I put a Runcore-IV 128 GB in my Macbook Air rev A, after the noises from my Samsung 80 GB became worse and worse.
Installation was without problems, if not entirely painless (that damn microphone cable).

Let me say two things:

1) This thing smokes. I haven't done formal benchmarks yet, but let my just show you this:

VM: 112G + 0 668654(4166) pageins, 117415(2289) pageouts

Thats more than 2000 real-world IOPS/s in the three seconds I used as the measurement interval here. This is like an SSD should be, not the lamers that were sold first. (The Samsung HD gets, like, 100.)

2) DON'T BUY IT. It only wakes up after sleep approximately 3 out of 4 times.
The error message is nine copies of "IOATAController device blocking bus" (I'm typing this from screen shots, as a catatonic disk of course makes sure you have no log).
The MBA finally goes into "ATA: Device recovery failed (0x00000003), terminating device", and you have a nicely woken up laptop that thinks it doesn't have a disk.
Works again after powerdown and reboot, but this is not the way an MBA should work.

I have the unrealistic hope there might be a firmware upgrade for this.
Until then, I'm keeping the SSD (see 1).
I had to "pmset -a hibernatemode 1" to get useful life out of my MBA again.
Painful.

[GillesB]

Re: MacBook Air Rev A with RunCore 1.8" Pro IV PATA ZIF Drive *ZIF PROBLEMS*

I experienced the same thing of impossibility to wake up.
What is your "pmset -a hibernatemode 1" supposed to do?

Will it work on a 10.6.1 system?

In the mean time I just switch it off as the boot time isn't much longer than wake up ...

[checkitout]

Re: MacBook Air Rev A with RunCore 1.8" Pro IV PATA ZIF Drive *ZIF PROBLEMS*

I experienced the same thing of impossibility to wake up.
What is your "pmset -a hibernatemode 1" supposed to do?

It switches on immediate hibernation, so the state is always saved to disk in stead of trying to wake up from RAM. This means that on wakeup the laptop goes through power-up selftest which seems to reliably wake up the runcore.

Will it work on a 10.6.1 system?

It should. Not tested.

In the mean time I just switch it off as the boot time isn't much longer than wake up ...

True. But then I'd need to restart all my applications and put them in the right state -- that's a lot of work.

BTW, the SMART state of the runcore is all jumbled. So I can't ask it how it feels.

Pioneers get shot full of arrows.